


The Fine Print

by curtaincall



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Humor, M/M, Pining, Romantic Comedy, Stonks, aziraphale's love language is reading the terms and conditions, can i speak to the manager of YOUR HEART?, don't judge a book(seller) by his cover, i love one (1) rules-lawyer angel, the inherent eroticism of contracts, the real Hell was capitalism all along kids, this fic stumbles drunkenly up to the edge of the T rating but does not quite topple over
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-26
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:15:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 37,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24931381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/curtaincall/pseuds/curtaincall
Summary: Anthony Crowley sells computer systems to London businesses–and specializes in sneaking extra charges and fees into the associated contracts. It’s nothisfault no one actually reads the paperwork before signing it.He thinks mild-mannered bookshop owner Aziraphale Fell will be an easy mark; surely no one that old-fashioned and dotty will spot a few carefully-worded technical clauses in his contract.And then Aziraphale comes back with some very polite, very pointed questions – and Crowley decides that maybe pulling off the sale isn’t his first priority anymore…
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 511
Kudos: 616
Collections: Good AUmens AU Fest, Good Omens Human AUs





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my work for the Good Omens AU Fest! The prompt is "angry customer/employee" but tbh this is more "extremely high-maintenance client/skeevy salesperson."

The thing was—Crowley worked on commission. He’d always rather liked that about Sales. The amount of money you made each month was _directly_ correlated with how good you were at your job. No need to pretend that you were putting in hours and hours in some windowless cubicle, clicking on random cells in a spreadsheet to make it seem to the boss that you were pulling your weight. In Sales, if you got results, you got paid, and then you got to skive off work for the rest of the month because you’d hit your revenue goal on the twelfth. It was as simple as that. 

There were three people in the Sales department at Barathrum Systems (a subdivision of the Leviathan Corporation), and Crowley had more clients than the other two put together. Hastur and Ligur, his coworkers, didn’t like that at _all._ “No one respects the old way of doing things anymore,” he’d heard Hastur muttering, after coming back from yet another game of golf that had ended in a promise to “think about it” rather than any actual results. “Wining, dining, getting to know the client—none of this bogus Millennial quantity-over-quality bullshit.”

Crowley, who was too old to be a Millennial even by the most generous definition (he'd checked), had simply smiled to himself. Because it wasn’t just a matter of quantity over quality. That _helped,_ of course. People nowadays didn’t long for deep personal relationships with their computer-systems salesman. They wanted to sign the contract and get out. You might catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but you caught the most with efficiency. (And flypaper.) It was also a matter of _strategy._

Because, of course, part of that natural human desire for efficiency also resulted in a natural human desire to speed through the boring parts of business interactions. Such as, notably, the signing of contracts with lots of very long, very elliptically worded clauses about _inasmuch as the undersigned hereby attests…_ and so forth. So after Crowley had spent the first part of his meeting with a new client establishing just how trustworthy and plain-dealing he was, he’d slide a fat stack of papers across and watch as their eyes glazed over while they skimmed the terms and conditions of sale. 

And that was where you got ‘em. There were all _sorts_ of completely legal things you could stick in a contract without the client noticing, and pass off down the line as “standard boilerplate language, sorry, would’ve been happy to change it for you if you’d pointed it out at the time, but….” Extremely limited warranties, rapidly increasing interest percentages, punishing penalties for defaulting on payment even once—all very easy to miss when buried in pages and pages of dry-as-dust contract-ese. More money for Barathrum, and, of course, more commission for Crowley.

The best part was, it was all their own fault. Oh, sure, Crowley was the one drawing up the terms of sale, but the clients were the ones signing off. Victims of their own laziness and inattention, they never bothered to check and see just what they were agreeing to. He figured it served as something of an object lesson in being careful.

He might have felt bad about it if it had been _individuals_ getting hit financially, but Barathrum sold POS systems to businesses. (POS stood, of course, for Point-of-Sale. Not Piece of Shit. Despite Crowley’s private opinions of their product quality.) It wasn’t actual _people_ who were paying for their failure to spot Crowley’s clauses. It was _corporations._ Really, he was just...redistributing wealth. (The fact that he was redistributing it into his own pockets was immaterial.)

He kept these thoughts mostly to himself, of course. He’d long since given up on getting his colleagues to understand.

“Right,” said Hastur, who was for some Godforsaken reason Sales team lead, “now that we’re _all_ here—” he glared meaningfully at Crowley— “let’s review yesterday’s deliverables.”

Crowley pretended not to notice the glare. Yes, he’d been late. There’d been traffic! And, yes, he was _always_ late, because there was _always_ traffic, but maybe that just meant that the daily team check-in should be at a more reasonable hour than nine-thirty, when sensible people were still half-asleep.

“I had a meeting with a priest,” Hastur was saying. “Told him how useful our systems would be for collecting the dues for their little Ladies’ Parish Knitting Circle.”

“Did he sign on?”

Hastur shook his head. “Not yet. These old birds take a bit of convincing. Set in their ways. But we’ll have him soon enough. Ligur?”

“Met for lunch with a member of some rural Town Council,” Ligur said. “Came in all the way just to talk.”

“And?” Hastur asked.

“Nothing doing yet,” Ligur said, “but, he took a business card, so.”

Crowley rolled his eyes. “Oh, he took a _business card,_ well, practically a guarantee, that.”

“What’d _you_ do, then, Mr. Wit?” Hastur asked.

Crowley tapped a pen thoughtfully against the table. “Got signatures on four different contracts, actually.”

Hastur did not look nearly as impressed with this as Crowley thought he ought to. “Got _signatures,_ huh?”

“Yeah,” Crowley said. “On contracts. You know contracts. They’ve got all these squiggly little black shapes on the paper and they pay our salaries?”

“Spare me the attempts at humour,” Hastur said. “Sure, you got their _signatures._ But did you get to know _them?”_

“Um,” said Crowley. “Like, biblically?”

“Like, _personally,”_ Ligur chimed in. “What makes them tick. What are their wants, their needs, their deepest, most shameful desires?”

“Well,” said Crowley, “I didn’t really think I needed a full, like, fetish accounting to determine their _wants and needs_ in the very specific area of POS systems.”

“That’s how you lose ‘em,” Ligur said sadly. “They start thinking you’re just after them for their money.”

“I...am, though.”

“But you can’t let ‘em _know_ that. You have to make each of your clients think that they’re the only one you care about. You might have their signatures now, Crowley, but in three years, when that contract’s up? They’ll find another girl to bring to the dance.”

“We _are_ still talking about sales, yeah?”

“Look,” Hastur said, “I know you think you get results—”

“—Because I _do—”_

“But at least _try_ it our way. Today. Spend a little more time with your prospective clients. Get to know them. Build a _relationship.”_

Crowley looked from Hastur to Ligur, considered the amount of effort it would take to argue vs. the amount of effort it would take to _build a relationship_ with whatever unlucky client happened to be on his schedule today, and nodded. “All right,” he said, peaceably.

Hastur looked suspicious. “You’re just agreeing? Like that?”

Crowley spread his hands. “Did you _want_ me to argue?”

“Uh,” said Hastur. “No?”

He glanced at Crowley again, as though expecting him to renege.

Crowley blinked with all the innocence he could muster.

“Right, then,” said Hastur, “let’s go over quarterly goals…”

According to Crowley’s calendar, his first meeting of the day, expected at noon, was with the proprietor of A.Z. Fell and Co., Booksellers. He’d Googled the shop that morning, discovering a website consisting mainly of WordArt explaining the (bafflingly complex) shop hours, image boxes from Photobucket requiring an upgraded account to enable 3rd party hosting, and exhortations to “check us out on MySpace!” A banner flashing at the top of the page informed the interested reader that the site would be unveiling its new look in December 2005.

This, while deeply revolting to Crowley’s aesthetic sensibilities, augured well for him when it came to the likelihood of getting one over on the bookseller using some strategically-deployed technobabble.

“Hello, Mr. Fell,” he said, pulling out a chair and giving the prospective client a quick once-over. His hair was slightly unkempt, sticking up from his head like a particularly self-important cumulus cloud; his clothing looked as though it likely pre-dated decimal coinage; and his smile was vaguer than a tech start-up’s mission statement. The overall effect was of the _idea_ of an antique bookseller, more than an actual person.

“So,” he continued, smoothly, sliding into his own chair, “you’re interested in upgrading your point-of-sale system?”

Fell made a face. “Not by choice,” he said, shaking his head. “But the old till just...gave out, the other day, and although I’d be perfectly all right counting change out by hand, my employee says it’s time we got up-to-date with—barcodes, and what have you.”

“Barcodes,” said Crowley, trying to keep a straight face. “Right.”

He was about to launch into his usual spiel about best-in-class inventory management and the optional cloud storage features when he caught sight of Hastur through the glass and remembered he was supposed to be _building a relationship._

“And you sell...old books?” he asked.

Fell’s face lit up. “Oh yes,” he said. “Well. When I can’t avoid it, you know.” He beamed.

Crowley frowned. “Sorry, when you—”

“Oh, that’s just—it’s a little joke I have with my employee, you know, she says that if I had my way I’d never let any of the customers actually purchase anything, ah, and I do admit, I have a tendency to get rather _attached_ to some of my stock, but, well, I defy anyone who gets his hands on a Wilkie Collins first edition to be actually _glad_ to see it move on…”

He moved, slightly, as he spoke, and Crowley found himself rethinking his earlier impressions of the man—noticing, now, the joy written in the lines around his eyes, the way his hands darted around, illustrating his points, the slight flush in his cheeks as he grew animated.

“So you’re, uh. The titular Mr. Fell, then?” he asked. 

“Eponymous,” said Fell.

Crowley blinked. “Sorry?”

“The eponymous Mr. Fell. Not the titular. If I were, I don’t know, the hero of a book called _Aziraphale Fell’s Grand Adventure, then_ I’d be the titular Mr. Fell.”

There were about six different things Crowley wanted to say to that, starting with “who the devil cares about the difference between titular and eponymous” and running all the way to “why do you pronounce _titular_ with such an emphasis on the _tit?”_

He settled on— “Your name’s _Aziraphale?”_

“Yes,” said Aziraphale, with the weary yet defencive air of someone who’d had to spell his name for every primary-school teacher, barista, and government official he had encountered over the last forty-odd years. 

Crowley, seeing the _and what about it?_ spark in his eyes, said only “New one on me, that’s all.”

Some of the suspicion left Aziraphale’s gaze. “It generally is.”

“Is it, ah, a family business?” Crowley asked, deeming a change of subject politic at this juncture. “Fell & Co?”

He recalled the storefront he’d glimpsed quickly on Google Maps—not precisely _shabby,_ but certainly no more up-to-date in its appearance than the man sitting before him. 

Aziraphale shook his head. “Oh, no. I, er—” he drew his hands together on his lap— “I came into some money, you know, oh, it must be a good twenty-five years ago, now, and being rather young and foolish at the time I thought I’d fulfill a childhood dream and buy a bookshop.”

“Oh yes,” said Crowley dryly, “typical youthful folly. Binge-drinking, making unfortunate sexual decisions, purchasing small retail establishments…”

“Oh,” said Aziraphale, the timbre of his voice changing slightly, “I assure you, I was very thorough in my. Ah. Oat-sowing, or what have you.”

Crowley laughed, the sound bursting out of him unconsciously in a way that surprised him. And _this,_ he realized, a surge of anger rising up as quickly as the laughter had, was why he didn’t _develop relationships_ with clients. Because now Aziraphale Fell was a _person_ to him, a person he almost _liked_ , and now he was going to feel _guilty_ about taking advantage of his obvious unworldliness to con him into signing a ridiculous contract.

He considered bringing this up to Hastur and Ligur before realizing that “guilt” was likely not an emotion that had ever crossed into either of their hearts.

“Well,” he said, smiling tightly, “shall we get down to business? I’m sure we can find just the right thing to suit your shop’s needs…”

He outlined, briefly, the specs of a system that would work for a shop of A.Z. Fell & Co.’s size, pausing at intervals to check for comprehension and receiving slightly muddled-looking nods in return. 

“So if that sounds acceptable to you…” he said, at last, and named the (apparent) price.

“Yes, yes,” Aziraphale said, his mind plainly (and understandably) wandering from the matter. “That’s, ah, that’s splendid, yes, it all sounds wonderful, I’m sure.”

“Great,” said Crowley. “I’ll draw up the contract straightaway, if you don’t mind waiting?”

The contract, of course, was already written; all Crowley needed to do was mix-and-match a few moveable parts and add in the name of the business. But he tended to let clients sit, cooling their heels, for the better part of an hour under the guise of “putting together a custom offer” — which had the effect both of making them feel as though they were getting something special, and making them appropriately impatient to get out that they’d read things over even _less_ carefully than usual. 

“Not at all,” Aziraphale said. “I’ll be quite comfortable here, I’m sure.”

Crowley stifled a smirk. His office design had been based less on _comfort_ and more on _fashion;_ it was all very minimalist and clean-looking, practically lifeless in its neatness. This had, he’d realized quickly, the pleasing side effect of making it far from a cozy place for clients to wait. Chairs without cushioning; fluorescent lights placed at a headache-inducing angle vis-a-vis the visitor’s seat; a complete lack of anything remotely interesting to look at. _And_ most mobile phone networks didn’t work in the Barathrum offices, which meant that even the distractions of the Internet were inaccessible to guests (because like Hell was Crowley sharing the WiFi password). Thirty minutes of bored, uncomfortable sitting, and they were chomping at the bit to sign whatever was put in front of them and get out the door.

Crowley began “typing up the contract” (weighing in on Reddit posts with the comments sorted by Controversial), sneaking a quick glance at Aziraphale as he settled in to wait.

To his slight surprise, Aziraphale pulled out a book and began reading. 

Which—all right, given that he _was_ a bookshop owner, maybe Crowley should’ve seen that one coming. He noticed, though, that Aziraphale appeared to be mostly done with the book, only a few unread pages ahead. So, there was that, at least.

He continued fake-working for another fifteen minutes or so. Aziraphale closed the book and released a sigh of contentment.

“Good read?” Crowley asked, hiding his own glee at the fact that _now_ the boredom ought to set in.

“Oh yes,” Aziraphale said happily. “All wrapped up just as it ought.”

But, rather than looking around idly for something to fix his eyes on, he produced _another_ book, humming slightly to himself as he opened it. 

Crowley wasn’t able to stop himself snorting in surprise. “Came prepared, didn’t you?”

Aziraphale looked up and smiled dreamily. “Oh, I always have something to read,” he said. “Don’t you worry about me. I’d be perfectly happy sitting here all day long.”

And if it weren’t for the—well, the _everything else about him,_ Crowley might have suspected him of _teasing._ As though he _knew_ exactly what Crowley was trying to do, and was having none of it.

He peered suspiciously over his monitor, searching for any shrewdness in Aziraphale’s gaze. But he just smiled mildly and turned to his book, flipping a page with what _had_ to be artlessness. 

Crowley scowled at his computer screen and began typing a lengthy response assuring a man who’d written into r/relationshipadvice that, yeah, proposing to his girlfriend at her sister’s baby shower was a _great_ idea.

He glanced over at Aziraphale again when he’d finished—still apparently engrossed in his novel. Well, then. All right. The boredom bit wasn’t exactly working, but that was fine, really. Better to move things along, anyway.

Crowley hit Print on the contract doc and stood up from his desk.

Aziraphale looked up. “Oh, are you done already?” he asked, closing his book.

“Yep,” Crowley said, and grabbed the papers from the printer, placing them in front of Aziraphale and re-taking his own seat.

“So,” he said, flashing his most trustworthy grin, “I’ll just need you to sign here, here, and here, and then we can have you on your way, Mr. Fell.” He nudged a pen towards Aziraphale.

“Oh—yes, rather,” Aziraphale said, nodding, “but—ah—let me just look this over first.”

Crowley felt his smile decrease in wattage. “It’s just what we talked about. The, erm, the language’s a bit complicated, but if you need me to explain anything—”

Aziraphale unfolded a pair of small wire spectacles and placed them delicately on his nose. “That’s very kind of you,” he said, and smiled brightly at Crowley before turning his attention to the contract.

He read quickly, making little hums and sighs as he went, and Crowley had to fight the urge to stand up and pace around.

At last, Aziraphale laid down the papers with great care, took off his glasses, folded them up, and replaced them in his breast pocket.

“All set, then?” Crowley asked.

Some expression tugged at the corner of Aziraphale’s mouth. “Oh yes.”

“Great—” began Crowley.

“But I _do_ just have a _few_ quick questions,” said Aziraphale.

“Uh,” said Crowley. “All right?”

Aziraphale smiled sweetly. “I’m _dreadfully_ sorry,” he said, “but I don’t _quite_ understand this bit about the financing for the system changing after one year. I had rather thought, for something of this sort, that it would be a fixed rate?”

“Erm—” said Crowley. 

“And,” Aziraphale swept onward, “the bit about the warranty—I mean to say, it appears so limited as to exclude almost _everything_ from being covered!”

“Does it, now?” said Crowley, weakly.

“And I really must insist that you take out this additional service charge for installation. It ought,” he said, pushing the papers back towards Crowley, “to be _included.”_

He sat back in his chair, still smiling in that same sunny way, with only the slightest flicker of steel in his eyes to show that he very much wasn’t joking about any of it.

Crowley swallowed hard. “That’s—I mean—I can, definitely, we can make those changes—”

“Good,” said Aziraphale, firmly, “because I simply _can’t_ sign this contract as-is, I’m sure you understand.”

“Uh,” said Crowley, brain whirring frantically, mouth spitting out only monosyllables, “I—yeah, that—yep.”

Aziraphale pulled an honest-to-goodness _pocketwatch_ out of his waistcoat, like he was the goddamn White Rabbit, or something, and tutted. “Oh dear,” he said. “I really must be going, I asked my employee to watch the shop while I was gone but she’ll want to be leaving soon.” He replaced the watch, and stood up. “So you’ll rewrite those few clauses, then, please? Is there a good time for me to come back and look the new version over again?”

Crowley fumbled his way into his calendar. “Um. Friday? At four? I’ve got that free.”

He _always_ kept Fridays at four blocked off on his calendar, for the very important client known as Starting The Weekend An Hour Early, Inc. 

“That should be _splendid,”_ Aziraphale said, and held out his hand.

Crowley stood up to shake it. “Thanks—” he began.

“Really, _such_ a pleasure doing business with you, I _do_ look forward to working together,” Aziraphale said, and was out the door before Crowley had a chance to reply.

He sank back into his seat, staring blankly at the paperwork in front of him, trying to process why, exactly, he felt as though a live wire had been strung through his veins, why his heart was hammering, why his palms seemed to have gone all sticky with sweat.

Crowley was used to getting one over on people. He now had the distinct feeling that this was what it was like to be on the receiving end, and he didn’t like it one single bit.

He envisioned, again, the way Aziraphale’s lips had pursed slightly in disapproving amusement when he’d pushed the papers back at Crowley, of the way he’d seen a flash of acute intelligence in those mild eyes.

He’d read the goddamn _paperwork._

And Crowley was going to see him again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well well well. if it isn't me, updating my fic after 2.5 months
> 
> seriously though I finished the other active WIPs so this has been REBORN from the ASHES of TOO MANY COMMITMENTS

Crowley frowned at his desk. He’d spent the last hour arranging and rearranging his two extremely cool and completely useless paperweights into the most attractive possible configuration. That was the problem with keeping things neat and minimalist: not a lot to fiddle with when you got nervous.

It was, of course, objectively ridiculous that he was nervous. A potential client was coming in for a meeting to discuss his contract, that was all. Someone Crowley had only met once before, for less than an hour, a _professional acquaintance._ Certainly nothing to get worked up about.

And yet—here he was, glancing at his watch every thirty seconds in case time had suddenly decided to go at a different pace, clicking in and out of windows on his computer, opening articles and not really reading them, double-checking the alphabetization of his client records. 

His reaction made complete sense, really. Crowley had gone so long without being second-guessed or questioned that he’d just become...complacent. Soft. And so having someone actually call him on his bullshit was obviously going to be intellectually invigorating. He hadn’t been expecting Aziraphale Fell to be as sharp and canny as he was, last time, but he knew better now, and this time he was _prepared._

He’d written up a new contract for A.Z. Fell and Co., a truly diabolical piece of work, if he did say so himself. All of the language Aziraphale had objected to last time had been duly removed, and in its place Crowley had added approximately five hundred words of new clauses and loopholes and hidden fees. It had taken him all day on Thursday, and he’d even stayed late, glancing up to see Hastur and Ligur leave as he tinkered with the wording of a particularly nasty little percentage change. 

And because Aziraphale had proven himself to be a far more formidable adversary than Crowley had been expecting, he’d even gone so far as to work in a number of decoy clauses, in the hopes that Aziraphale would find those out, demand their removal, and pat himself on the back, thinking he’d spotted all there was to spot. If Crowley felt a slight twinge of guilt at the idea, that was quickly neutralized by imagining just how satisfying it would feel to get one over on the eagle-eyed Mr. Fell.

Really, he told himself, as the digits of his watch clicked over to 4:00, this might be the best thing to happen to his career in ages. He’d been getting complacent. A little challenge, a go at matching wits with someone actually worth the trouble—just what he needed.

Aziraphale bustled in two minutes late, full of apologies that Crowley instantly doubted. Oh, he _seemed_ sincere enough, nattering on about “a simply _dreadful_ customer” and “really _couldn’t_ get away, I’m _so_ sorry to have kept you waiting, and on a _Friday,”_ but Crowley couldn’t help but suspect that the whole White Rabbit act was a ploy to throw him off his rhythm.

“Mr. Fell,” he said, as smoothly as possible given the inconvenient fact that his heart had begun doing a first-rate imitation of a woodpecker. “Glad to see you back.”

Aziraphale beamed. “The pleasure’s all mine, I’m sure,” he said, settling into the metal chair as though he could make it cozy via transference. “I do appreciate you fitting me in again so soon.”

“No trouble at all,” Crowley said. 

“Shall we get right to it, then?”

Crowley briefly flirted with the idea of pretending he couldn’t work the printer in order to delay the contract review and pressure Aziraphale to read and sign more quickly. But, given how unsuccessful that strategy had been last time, he decided against it and nodded instead. “Got your revised paperwork right here,” he said, handing it over.

Aziraphale beamed again. “Oh, _thank_ you,” he said, settling his spectacles on his nose. “Now, I _do_ hope you managed to take out those, ah, those few small items that didn’t seem quite right to me.”

“Of course. Happy to accommodate.”

“Oh, indeed,” Aziraphale murmured, and began reading.

Crowley watched him carefully. It was more compelling than it ought to have been, probably, seeing him pore over every word, making little tick marks in the margins with his pen. 

At length, Aziraphale looked up.

“Well?” Crowley asked, cringing internally at the eagerness in his tone. “Look all right?”

“I see that you _have_ taken out all the clauses to which I objected last time,” Aziraphale allowed. “However, it seems as though in doing so you’ve introduced several _new_ conditions which I really _must_ insist that you remove.”

“Oh? Well, ‘course, happy to accommodate our clients, you know, just, ah, what conditions would those be? Exactly?”

Crowley held his breath. He’d known all along that Aziraphale would find at least _some_ of the tricks he’d planted in there, that had been the _plan,_ but now was the moment of truth as to whether he’d managed to find _all_ of them.

“First off,” Aziraphale said, “it seems as though you’ve lengthened the term covered by the agreement to _five_ years, not three.”

Crowley scratched his head. That was all right, then, that was one of the ones he’d expected Aziraphale to spot. “Oh, yeah, sorry about that, must’ve been a misprint.”

“While I of course hope that your systems will prove satisfactory for my business, I can’t commit to five years at this early date, I’m sure you understand.”

Crowley nodded.

“And,” Aziraphale continued, “while you’ve set the interest rate at a fixed percentage, as I asked, I see that you’ve added an annual renewal fee, which, if my arithmetic is correct, would cost nearly as much as the rising rate from the last version.”

“More, actually,” Crowley said under his breath.

“What was that?”

“I said, I’ll take it out, no problem.”

“Excellent,” said Aziraphale, and smiled. “Furthermore, it appears as though the, ah, the technical specifications outlined herein have been reduced significantly. Is there a reason for that? Certainly, if you feel this model is the best fit for my needs, I’m willing to switch—you are, of course, the expert here—but it _would_ seem to _me_ as though a less powerful system ought to cost me less, oughtn’t it?”

Crowley sighed. He’d really hoped that one would slip by—he’d seen the A.Z. Fell & Co website, for heaven’s sake. It didn’t precisely indicate that the proprietor had more than the most rudimentary and outdated understanding of computers. 

“Ah—no, we can...we can stay with the system we discussed earlier. I’ll make sure the specs are corrected in the contract.”

“Oh, _thank_ you,” Aziraphale said warmly. 

Crowley reached out to take the paperwork back from him. “Is that all, then? I can make those changes—”

“Oh, no, there is one more thing,” Aziraphale said, holding on to the papers with a surprisingly firm hand. “You see, I’d asked you about the warranty—the way it was framed in the original draft seemed to indicate that scarcely _anything_ would be covered.”

“Ye-es.”

“And I see you’ve changed it, just as I asked, but—and now, this is really _very_ wily of you, I must say—it appears that you’ve merely redone the wording and shuffled the conditions around to different parts of the document. Buried them in some of the paragraphs that I _didn’t_ take exception to before. As though you thought I’d simply see that the opening sentences were the same and skim over them.”

Crowley pasted an affable smile on. It came more easily than he might have expected, given that he’d just been caught out attempting to get one over on his newest client and was therefore about to take a not insignificant hit in terms of his commission. “I assure you, Mr. Fell, I wouldn’t _dream_ of trying to slip anything past you.”

“Oh, _do_ call me Aziraphale. And I very much wish I could believe that, Mr. Crowley.”

“Just Crowley’s fine,” Crowley said awkwardly. “So, shall I, ah, make those changes, then…?”

Aziraphale produced his pocket watch. “Do you know,” he said, “I’ve actually got nowhere to be, at the moment, so if it’s convenient for you I’d think you can just make the changes I’ve indicated right now. While I wait.”

“You want to _watch_ me edit your contract?”

“I do think it’s much the best way to prevent any further... _deviousness,_ shall we say, on your part, don’t you?”

Crowley felt himself flush. “No intention of being deviant—sorry, _devious,_ don’t know what I—well, no intention of being any of it, anyway.”

“Mmm,” said Aziraphale, and smiled vaguely.

Crowley, unsure how to object in any terms that wouldn’t serve merely to raise further suspicions, took the contract back from him with a noncommittal grunt. He flipped through the pages, keenly aware of Aziraphale’s steady gaze on him. Was this how his clients felt, when he watched them review documents? No wonder they got flustered and missed things. 

Aziraphale, however, didn’t appear to have missed _anything,_ Crowley realized with a sinking certainty as he glanced over the excisions and additions, all clearly noted in oppressively neat handwriting. He’d found every single clause that Crowley had snuck in—the decoys _and_ the real ones, all of them—and the resulting document was far more straightforward and client-friendly than anything Crowley could remember having written in the last decade.

He opened up the file on his computer and got to work making the changes, glancing up occasionally to see that Aziraphale was still watching him.

“Don’t s’pose you’d like to come over this side of the desk and read over my shoulder,” he said, aiming for sardonic and landing, he feared, somewhere just south of sexual harassment. 

Aziraphale, thankfully, didn’t seem to take it amiss. “I don’t think so, no. I can’t imagine it would be very edifying.”

“Just thought—you said you wanted to watch, that’s all. Keep an eye out for _deviousness._ Can’t imagine you’re getting much out of the view from over there.”

Aziraphale frowned. “Am I making you uncomfortable?”

“Nah,” Crowley lied. “Not at all. Only thought you looked a bit bored, over there.”

“If I’m making you uncomfortable, I’m quite happy to read—”

“Oh yeah,” Crowley snapped without thinking, “The Amazing Bottomless Bag of Books, I remember—”

“I like to come prepared,” Aziraphale said haughtily.

“Right,” Crowley said, realizing it perhaps wasn’t the best idea to antagonize the client. “I mean—not uncomfortable, that’s all.”

“Very well,” Aziraphale said, but he pulled a book out of his bag anyway.

It _was_ easier to write without being actively observed, and Crowley managed to finish up the changes to the contract in a few, thankfully non-excruciating, minutes. He hit Print with a feeling of far greater triumph than was likely warranted by the contents of the document.

“There you are, then,” he said, handing the finished product off to Aziraphale. “Nothing in there to take exception to.”

“I’ll be the judge of that, I think,” Aziraphale said, and began running a careful finger down the page.

“Well, then,” he said, at last. “This appears satisfactory, I must say.”

“Terrific,” Crowley said, “so, uh, if you’re ready to go ahead and sign, then…”

“Oh yes, certainly.” He signed quickly, a series of loosely linked swoops of the pen, nothing like the neat margin-notes of earlier. 

“Congratulations, Mr. Fell,” Crowley said, sticking out a hand. “You’re officially the newest client of Barathrum Systems.”

“Splendid,” Aziraphale said, and they shook. His hands were softer than Crowley had been anticipating—if he _had_ been anticipating, that was, which he definitely had _not—_ slightly cooler than Crowley’s own, but not so cold as to be unpleasant. “What would the next steps be, then?”

“I’ll get this squared away with our finance team,” Crowley said, “invoice you for the first payment, and we’ll reach out to arrange for a tech to come over and set up your system. No reason we can’t have it up and running within the fortnight.”

“Excellent,” Aziraphale said, standing up. “Will that be all for today, then?”

“Think so. I’ll, uh—I can walk you out.”

Aziraphale blinked. “You really don’t—” he began, but broke off, features shifting from bewilderment into gratification. “That is—that would be very kind of you.”

Crowley made a sound which hopefully conveyed _why, yes, we do that for all our clients, nothing particular to you, or anything, not that you were implying there was_ and got up from his desk. 

“Did you drive here,” he asked, leading Aziraphale down the corridor towards the door, “or…”

“Oh, no—that is—I don’t drive, you see. I’m actually—it’s very lucky, because I live in the flat just above my shop, so to get to work I just sort of…pop down. Easiest commute imaginable.”

“Certainly beats traffic,” Crowley agreed, “or a crowded tube line.”

“And other than that, well, I like walking, you know. Even when the weather’s dreary.”

It wasn’t particularly dreary today, though, Crowley noted as they stepped outside. In fact, there were a number of people milling about, presumably taking advantage of the unseasonably warm weather. Not far away, a harried-looking young mother was holding onto a pram with one hand and a rather sticky-looking toddler with the other.

“Well, thank you very much,” Aziraphale said.

Crowley had just opened his mouth to say something that was doubtless going to be very clever, once he worked it out, but was forestalled by a shrill scream.

He turned, alarmed, to look. The scream had come from the young mother, because—oh, _Christ,_ oh, fuck—her pram had somehow got away from her and was rolling inexorably into the street. Everything seemed to be moving simultaneously very quickly and very slowly—Crowley saw, as though frozen, the look of abject horror in the woman’s eyes, the car headed towards the pram at such a pace that it seemed impossible it could stop in time.

And he saw Aziraphale dart out into the street, directly into the path of the oncoming car, and pull the pram back to the safety of the pavement.

A car horn blared with the irritation particular to drivers who have narrowly avoided an accident of their own making, and time snapped back into place.

“Holy _shit,”_ Crowley said.

Aziraphale, apparently unperturbed, was fussing over the baby, which had, understandably, begun wailing. “What?” he asked, not looking at Crowley.

“You just—” Crowley began. “You _ran into traffic,_ are you _insane,_ you could have been _killed—”_

Aziraphale turned to face him, at that. “It may have been rather foolish of me, yes,” he admitted, “but, well, I don’t know, it seemed as though _someone_ ought to do _something.”_ Anxiety swept over his face. “I mean, the poor thing just rolling away, and the car coming so quickly, and—you don’t think it was _wrong_ of me _,_ surely?"

"Uh, no," Crowley said, "pretty sure no one is gonna tell you off for literally _saving a child's life."_

"Oh, good," Aziraphale said, apparently relieved, "I _did_ think so, but one never knows."

Crowley sputtered something unintelligible even to himself. 

Because—he’d had one very particular impression of Aziraphale Fell when the man had walked into his office, _viz_ ., a sort of featherbrained, affable eccentric. He’d completely revised said impression upon witnessing Aziraphale’s razor-sharp eye for fiddly contractual details, into “probably the cleverest bastard of my acquaintance _._ ” And now, apparently, he had to think _again,_ because this was _also_ a person who ran out into traffic without thinking in order to save a complete stranger, and who was, therefore, some variety of kind, brave idiot. 

Crowley wondered briefly if Aziraphale might be twins. Triplets? Something.

The mother came dashing over to them, holding the toddler firmly (Crowley was glad to note) by the hand and emitting a steady stream of _oh_ _my God_ s and _thank you_ s.

“Is he all right?” she asked, practically shoving Aziraphale out of the way and reaching into the pram to extract the crying infant. “Are you—there, now, shh, Mama’s got you, come on—thank you _so much,”_ she told Aziraphale, once the tears had abated somewhat, “I swear to God I thought I had the handle firm, but Zoe was pulling so hard, and the next thing I knew—I don’t know _what_ would have happened if you hadn’t been there, thank _Heaven_ you were, I can’t believe—you’re an angel, honestly, I’m so—”

“Oh—really, no—” Aziraphale said, visibly uncomfortable. “I’m only glad no one was hurt.”

“An _angel,”_ the woman repeated, firmly. She patted the baby on the back, and—well, apparently the rapid movement of the last few minutes had had _some_ impact, after all, because the baby made a small noise and loosed a stream of spit-up onto Aziraphale’s overcoat. 

“Oh my _God,”_ the mother said, clearly mortified, “I can’t believe—I am _so_ sorry, oh my God—”

“It’s quite all right,” Aziraphale said unconvincingly, looking down at his coat with an expression that suggested _he_ might very well vomit. 

“Can you let me pay for the cleaning, or something, please, it’s really the least I can do—”

“No,” Aziraphale said quickly, “no, no, that won’t be necessary, not at _all._ Really, ah, please don’t let’s say any more about it.” He sent Crowley a beseeching, help-me-out-here glance (which, okay, now apparently Crowley had to add “able to communicate eloquently through eye movements” to the catalogue of contradictory and fascinating things he was learning about Aziraphale Fell).

“Aaah,” Crowley said, “you know, why don’t I, uh, take it.”

Aziraphale frowned. “I’m sorry, I don’t—”

“I can take it,” Crowley said, because apparently he was committed to whatever the hell this course of action was, “I can just. Take it.”

“Erm. I suppose?” Aziraphale said, blinking in evident bewilderment, and carefully removed his overcoat, handing it over to Crowley. Who was now, he realized, holding a vomit-covered overcoat, so, well done on that, great strategy, there.

“Thank you _so much,”_ the mother said yet again, “I really—” the ambulatory child tugged on her hand— “just a moment, Zoe, we need to thank the nice angel man—” 

“You have,” Aziraphale said, “quite sufficiently.”

“Mooooom,” Zoe said, “we need to _go—”_

And, with another frantic thank-you and some reshuffling of hands, the little family was gone, and Crowley was left standing next to Aziraphale, still holding the coat.

“Uh,” he said, “that was—a thing.”

“Indeed,” Aziraphale said, wrinkling his nose. “One never _does_ foresee the consequences of one’s actions, does one, if I’d known saving the child would lead to the ruin of my favourite coat perhaps I’d have thought better of it.”

“Sorry, you—” Crowley broke off upon seeing the spark of mischief in Aziraphale’s eyes. “Oh. Joke. Got it.”

“I’m not joking about it being my favourite coat, though,” Aziraphale said, regretfully eyeing the stain, which Crowley was holding as far away from his body as possible. “Still, I expect it’s nothing cleaners won’t be able to handle. Although why you thought that inviting me to _disrobe_ was an appropriate response to the situation—”

“You could’ve let her pay for it,” Crowley pointed out, largely because he was very invested in pushing past the whole “disrobe” bit and also because it very much _hadn’t_ been an appropriate response to the situation. 

“Oh, no,” Aziraphale said, “I really _couldn’t_ put a young mother to such expense. Besides. It won’t be any trouble affording it. I’ve just got an _excellent_ deal on my new computer system, after all.”

“Ah. Heh. Yeah, that’s—that’s right. Um. Want your coat back, then? Angel,” he added, as a sort of half-hearted stab at repartee.

“Oh dear,” Aziraphale said, “she really _did_ say that a _number_ of times, didn’t she, it was—”

“A lot,” Crowley admitted, and then, because apparently his single brain cell had decided to take a holiday, “but, uh, not entirely wrong, was she?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Just because, you _did_ save the kid, um, and that’s very protective, or something, which is what angels are supposed to be, if I—well, anyway, seems suitable. That’s all.”

“Hmm,” Aziraphale said, looking, amazingly, _not_ as though he were about to report Crowley for being a general menace to society and all-around creep. “I _do_ want it.”

“What?”

“My coat,” Aziraphale clarified hastily, “I want my coat.”

“Oh. Right,” Crowley said, and handed it over.

“Well, then. I suppose I really _must_ be getting back to the shop, now, so…”

“Oh yeah,” Crowley said, aware, suddenly, of how long they’d been standing outside (at how long _he’d_ been away from his desk, not that anyone was likely to notice him gone, or that such behavior was inconsistent with his previously demonstrated work ethic). “Well. Bye, then.”

“Good-bye,” Aziraphale said, and, with a sunny smile, crossed the street (looking side to side for cars, this time), and disappeared into the indistinct masses.

Crowley stood there, looking after him.

“Right,” he said aloud, after a moment, and walked purposefully back inside the Barathrum offices, straight to his desk, where he picked up his phone and punched in an extension.

“Newton Pulsifer speaking,” came the slightly unsteady voice of Barathrum’s worst installation tech.

“Hey, Newt. Listen—”

“Crowley! You’re still here? It’s Friday—”

“Are you a time-clock or a tech?” Crowley snapped. “Look, Newt, there’s a new client just come in, A.Z. Fell & Co. Booksellers.”

“Oh, nice work, Crowley,” Newt said happily, “bet you got ‘em good on the contract—”

“Least lucrative document of my career, actually,” Crowley said. “Feels fantastic. But, listen, they’re going to get their system put in next week, once the finances’re sorted out, and I want you to manage it so you’re the one who goes over to do the installation.”

“All right,” said Newt, “uh, why—”

“Because I’m coming with you,” said Crowley.


	3. Chapter 3

Crowley had made it a priority, when he’d first started working at Barathrum, to get acquainted with the installation techs. Despite his penchant for drawing up contracts that were...less than straightforward, he had his own sort of moral code for the way he handled clients. They might’ve signed a shitty set of terms, but they were entitled to every single thing listed in those terms, and Crowley had no intention of going back on his word. Besides, he’d already got his commission. The installation came out of Barathrum’s pockets, not his, which meant that Crowley got to play the affable “sorry, really, I’m doing everything I can for you but my hands are tied” card without even really lying about it.

So he knew all the techs fairly well, and—importantly—knew which were the most easily cajoled into doing what he wanted. Newt Pulsifer, who had always struck Crowley as the sort of person who’d never grown out of believing that you got pregnant by swallowing a melon seed and waiting for it to sprout, was foremost among these. 

He was also, unfortunately, not a very good installation tech—not that Crowley kept track, but he was fairly certain there were more service complaints about Pulsifer-installed systems than the rest of the team put together. This gave Crowley some pause—he had a strong feeling that Aziraphale wouldn’t look kindly upon an incompetent tech—but Sales team members generally didn’t come along on these visits, and Crowley wasn’t sure anyone but Newt would’ve made an exception for him.

The system installation at A.Z. Fell & Co. was scheduled for Tuesday at three. Crowley, accordingly, started pacing around his office at quarter past two, after a morning spent typing and retyping client emails without really looking at the text. He’d even tried listening to a guided meditation on his phone, despite the fact that a calm voice telling him to empty his mind of anxieties never failed to fill him with the perverse desire to grow _more_ anxious, because who was the voice to tell him what to do, anyway?

Thankfully, Crowley had only been pacing for about ten minutes (and, incidentally, made substantial progress towards the daily step goal he pretended not to care about) when Newt showed up, dragging a wheely bag behind him.

 _“There_ you are,” Crowley said with the snippiness of deep relief. “Thought you’d never show up.”

“I’m not late, am I?” Newt asked, pushing his glasses up his nose. “I thought you said three—”

“Yeah, yeah, not late, whatever,” Crowley said, glancing at his watch on the off chance time had decided to run at a different pace since he’d last glanced at it twenty seconds ago. “Got everything, have you?”

Newt tapped the wheely bag. “Think so.”

“Terrific,” Crowley said, grabbing his keys. “Shall we, then?”

Newt eyed his hand warily. “Uh, I think technically we’re supposed to take the company van on installations—”

“Newt. Newton. Your full name _is_ Newton, right? Doesn’t matter, don’t tell me, I won’t remember. Point is, Newt, if you think I’m going to be caught dead driving the _company van—”_

“Well, actually, I think it’s supposed to be _me_ driving it, I don’t think you’re authorized—”

“So much the better,” Crowley said. “Can we get on, then? Don’t want to get held up in traffic, do we?”

Newt made a sound that Crowley decided to interpret as assent against all evidence to the contrary.

“Great,” he said, and headed out of his office, Newt and his wheely bag following close behind. 

“Crowley?” Hastur stopped them on their way out the door. “Leaving early, are you?”

“No,” Crowley said, gesturing to Newt. “Just heading out with Newt here to oversee a client’s installation.”

Hastur frowned. “That’s not exactly standard—”

“Aren’t you the one who said I should be working to have a more, uh, a more personal relationship with my clients? Thought the systems installation was a bit more of a natural point of contact than a round of golf.”

Crowley was arrested momentarily by a vivid mental picture of Aziraphale on a golf course, laughably overdressed, probably holding the club all wrong, listening as some faceless golf professional tried to explain woods and irons to him and sending Crowley wry looks from across the green. However, even Crowley’s prodigious imagination was incapable of extending the vision to himself in a pastel-colored golf shirt and tailored shorts with knee-high sport socks, and the illusion shattered into a thousand verdant pieces.

“All right,” Hastur said, still not sounding entirely convinced. “Long as you’re still hitting your goals, I guess…”

Crowley’s impulse to remind Hastur that he wasn’t, in fact, Crowley’s boss, just Sales lead with no actual managerial authority, warred with his impulse to make as quick and painless an exit as possible. The decision was made for him by the nervously hovering presence of Newt behind him, and the realization that if they didn’t leave now they might well be late (and Crowley had no idea how Aziraphale reacted to lateness, maybe he would tut, or something, and Crowley _definitely_ didn’t want to see him tut, that absolutely wasn’t a mental image that he found compelling in a way perhaps best not examined at the present juncture, no, not at all).

So he simply said “of course” in uncharacteristically deferential tones, and motioned for Newt to follow him outside to the car.

Crowley’s own car was objectively better than the company van on a number of different axes, chief among these being the ability to go actually _fast,_ or as fast as one _could_ go through clogged London streets.

Newt, for some reason, seemed not to appreciate this feature.

“Do you know,” he said, looking disturbingly green, “I don’t think you’re covered by the company insurance policy in this car even though we’re on the clock, so if you _do_ hit someone you’ll very likely be liable—”

“If you’re going to be sick,” Crowley said, “make certain you do it out the window. Upholstery’s a bear to clean.”

Newt nodded, apparently deciding that his mouth was better off closed for the present.

They reached A.Z. Fell & Co at three minutes to three, with just enough time for Crowley to park and Newt to double-check the contents of the wheely bag before entering.

Crowley had spent the past several days obsessively Googling “A.Z. Fell & Co interior” and got nowhere (the shop’s web presence being what it was, he hadn’t expected much, but apparently nary an Instagrammer had seen fit to capture the inside of the place, or at least if they had they didn’t location-tag it). He’d wondered whether Aziraphale was obsessively neat or rather messy, whether the keenness and precision he’d shown in reading the contract carried through to his shop, or if it would have the same gently unmoored affect that Aziraphale had first shown, that sense of being a balloon with a smiley face drawn on, drifting away from its owner in small bobs. 

It was the latter, Crowley realized upon entering; the shop wasn’t _dirty,_ exactly, but the shelves certainly weren’t about to pass any white-glove tests, and the organizational system was either arcane or nonexistent, judging by the way books lay in haphazard piles on furniture and flooring. Crowley half-expected to see a spider drop down from a storybook-perfect web and wink at him.

The shop was apparently empty of customers, and Crowley glanced around for the till, looking for Aziraphale.

What he found instead was a spectacled young woman with a large quantity of thick dark hair, her lips moving soundlessly as she dangled a pendant in front of the large tome laying on the desk.

No Aziraphale, then. Crowley probably shouldn’t have been as surprised as he was; he’d mentioned an employee, after all, and it stood to reason that the man didn’t spend literally every waking moment in his shop. Actually, it was very likely a _good_ thing, from the Barathrum perspective, that Aziraphale was missing. Nobody to carp about what would surely be a subpar installation on Newt’s part. Nobody to purse his lips in disappointment and murmur about _his_ understanding of that particular clause…

Crowley was hit by a wave of wholly illogical melancholy.

Still—the thing had to be done, and the sooner they got the system installed, the sooner they could depart with minimal lung damage, so Crowley crossed the shop to the till, motioning for Newt to follow him.

The young woman looked up at his approach. (Upon closer observation of her attire, Crowley wondered whether “style sense from 1862” might be a requirement of employment at A.Z. Fell & Co.)

“Oh,” she said, in a soft, precise, American-accented voice. “You’re the man from the computer company, aren’t you?”

Crowley uttered the vocal equivalent of a skier navigating a heavily-moguled trail and shook his head. “Well, he’s the one you want, really,” he said, gesturing to Newt. “I’m just here to supervise. Probably don’t even need to be here the whole time,” he added, forming a vague plan to see whether there was a cafe nearby where he could stare at his phone and ignore an overpriced espresso beverage. 

“Okay,” the woman said, dragging out the vowel. “I guess I’ll get Mr. Fell, then, he said he wanted to oversee the installation…”

Crowley, who’d begun to leave in what he hoped was a minimally-conspicuous slink, tripped over his feet and tongue simultaneously. “So—wha—he’s _here?”_

The clerk frowned at him with entirely understandable confusion. “Yes? He’s just in the back room, did you need to ask him about something before you left, or…”

“No, no, no,” said Crowley, quickly, “nothing like that, don’t need him for anything, nothing at _all,_ definitely not, I just, hmm, do you know what, I’ve remembered that there was this policy change that means actually I _do_ have to stay and oversee the installation, heh, uh, yeah, definitely forgot about that.”

Newt made a noise that sounded suspiciously like it was heading towards some kind of negation. Crowley whirled on his heel and fixed him with what he hoped was a sufficiently menacing glare. (He’d been workshopping the menacing glare for some time. It had about a 50 percent rate of success and a 50 percent rate of causing the glaree to inquire whether Crowley had something in his eye.) Newt, thankfully, shut up.

The clerk, who had been regarding Crowley with rapidly increasing apprehension, shook her head. “You can start setting up while I get Mr. Fell,” she told Newt, apparently deciding that he was the sane one of the pair. “There’s only the one counter, and we’ve got the old register on it but you can feel free to move it away, it’s not working.”

Newt nodded, and the woman disappeared through a small doorway with clear relief.

“Sorry,” Crowley told Newt, “didn’t mean to, erm, confuse you, I just—”

 _“Is_ there a new regulation?” Newt asked. “Or—look, you can tell me, I can take it, did they send you to keep an eye on me because I haven’t been doing my job properly. Am I getting fired? Oh, my God, Crowley, I’m getting fired, please just tell me—”

“No!” Crowley said, alarmed. “God, no, Newt, you’re not getting _fired,_ no one _sent_ me, it’s got nothing to do with you! No, it’s just—it’s literally just what I told Hastur when we were leaving. I’ve been told to take a more personal interest in my clients, that’s all. But not much point in me being here if the client isn’t, is there? So when I thought Az—uh, Mr. Fell, when I thought he wasn’t here I didn’t think it was worth staying, that’s all.”

“All right,” said Newt, seemingly unconvinced by what was, after all, more or less the truth. Crowley _had_ been told to make a more personal interest in his clients. The fact that he’d had little intention of following this direction before Aziraphale had come in was a mere detail.

“It’s just,” Newt said, unzipping the wheely bag and beginning to set up the installation, “sometimes I feel like no one really trusts me to do my job—”

Crowley braced himself for a monologue on Newt’s various insecurities and regrets, but was mercifully saved by the re-entrance of the clerk, followed by Aziraphale.

“Thank you _so_ much for fetching me, Anathema,” he was saying, “I was _entirely_ lost in that volume of Spinoza and I doubt whether I should have heard anything if you hadn’t come.”

“Of course,” the clerk—Anathema—said. “Still not sure what you think you’ll get out of watching the installation, but…”

“I simply want to know how it all _works._ I understand that a certain amount of—artificial intelligence, or what have you, is necessary these days, but you know I can be a _bit_ old-fashioned about computers, and privacy, and I’d just like to be assured that it isn’t—I don’t know, _listening_ to us, or something.”

“Planning on saying something you wouldn’t want us to hear?” Crowley asked.

Aziraphale turned to face him. “Oh, _Crowley,”_ he said, sounding—oddly—not a bit surprised. “I did wonder whether you’d come.”

“You did?” Crowley asked, barely restraining himself from adding on _you were wondering about me?_

“Well,” Aziraphale said, “I admit I don’t know much about how this sort of thing usually goes, but I rather thought you might come and supervise. You don’t do the installation yourself, I take it?”

“Naaah,” Crowley said, “you wouldn’t want that.”

“No, I see, that must be _your_ job,” Aziraphale said, approaching Newt. “I don’t believe we’ve met, you are…?”

“Newton Pulsifer.”

“Well, very good to meet you, Newton; I’m Aziraphale and this is my shop, and this young lady is Anathema, my…”

“Occult consultant and customer service specialist,” Anathema said promptly.

“Yes, that.” Aziraphale smiled faintly at Anathema. “Why don’t you take your break, now, dear girl, it’s not as though we’ll be able to ring up customers for the next while in any case.” He sounded, Crowley noticed, rather pleased about this.

“All right,” Anathema said. “Back in an hour.”

“Now, then,” Aziraphale said, turning to Crowley, who had the sudden and ridiculous thought that he might have sent Anathema away _on purpose._ “I’m less concerned about your colleagues overhearing me than I am about—oh, government wiretaps, all that sort of thing.”

“Mmm,” Crowley said, nodding. “Not surprised.”

“Oh? I suppose you’re not going to say that if I’m not doing anything wrong I’ve got nothing to worry about?”

“Eurgh,” said Crowley. “No, I meant I’m not surprised that you’re trying to hide from the government. I mean—” he gestured around himself— “this is _clearly_ a front for _something,_ yeah? I’m only trying to decide whether you sell drugs or contract out murders.”

Aziraphale frowned, and Crowley worried for a moment whether he’d gone too far, interpreted Aziraphale’s tone as more open to teasing than it actually had been. “Such limited imagination,” he said at last. “Drugs and murder? That’s all you can think of?”

Crowley grinned in relief. “Oh, yeah, well, please, enlighten me, Mr. Fell, ‘s not exactly as though I have much experience with the criminal underworld—”

“I beg to differ, those interest rates you showed me at our first meeting were nothing short of highway robbery—”

“Not exactly a fair comparison, is it, at least I’m aboveboard—”

“Regardless,” Aziraphale said firmly, “whatever sort of...den of iniquity you believe I’m running here, surely you understand that I don’t approve of having things I don’t fully comprehend in my shop, particularly _technology.”_

“Wise of you,” Crowley said, with the corner of his brain that wasn’t playing _den of iniquity_ on repeat. “But I promise, we’re not putting in anything more or less than was agreed to in the contract. No fancy surveillance, no tracking your sales for our records. All the inventory and purchase data stays entirely local.”

“If you say so.”

Crowley spread his hands. “Why’d you sign the contract if you don’t trust me?”

“I did have to get a new computer system from _somewhere,_ didn’t I?”

“We at Barathrum Systems are thrilled to be the choice you settle for,” Crowley said dryly. “Thinking of changing the motto to that, actually.”

“Are you, then? What is it now?”

_“Better the devil you know.”_

“Is it really? How fitting.”

“Nah,” Crowley admitted. “Haven’t got a motto. We _have_ got a mission statement, though.”

“Is it any good?”

“Hearing it has me looking about for the nearest toilet to be sick in, actually.”

“Exactly what a mission statement should be, then,” said Aziraphale, his face perfectly straight.

Crowley laughed. Not his client laugh, either, the Professional Chuckle he’d honed over years of listening to jokes that ranged from banal to vaguely offensive—a _real_ laugh, the somewhat embarrassing cackle that burst out of him when he’d been shocked into genuine amusement. After the first wave had subsided, he glanced at Aziraphale, saw the way he’d pressed his lips together as though holding back a wave of hilarity, saw the telltale twitching at the corner of his mouth, and was off again.

“Excuse me?” Newt poked a rumpled head up from beneath the counter. “Mr. Fell, sorry, I just need to ask a couple of questions about the wiring on your old system…”

Aziraphale shook his head. “I don’t know whether I can be much help,” he said, “but I can certainly _try.”_ He crossed the shop to Newt, who started babbling on about something-or-other that Crowley only half understood.

The shop door chimed, and Crowley turned instinctively to see who’d entered. It was a man, walking in as though he were familiar with the place and exuding immense motivational speaker energy. 

“We’re closed,” Aziraphale called, without looking up from the counter.

“You _can’t_ be closed. It’s not even four. According to the bylaws—”

Aziraphale, apparently recognizing the voice, rose from where he’d been crouching next to Newt. “I’m having a new computer system installed. All very...state-of-the-art. Modern. Surely you can’t object to that.”

Crowley, who could’ve objected to Aziraphale’s use of _state-of-the-art_ to describe any of Barathrum’s offerings, was struck instead by the new tension in Aziraphale’s tone. He’d sounded—well, not _relaxed,_ exactly, earlier, but certainly not as tightly-wound as he sounded—and looked—now, voice climbing an octave and hands wringing in front of him.

“Well,” said the stranger, in tones too jovial to be really friendly, “glad to see you’re taking to heart at least _some_ of the memos we’ve been sending! I mean, really, Aziraphale, you should’ve thrown out that old register at the turn of the century. Not to mention your inventory system—”

“As I have told you on numerous occasions, Gabriel,” Aziraphale said, voice impressively icy despite his clearly still-trembling hands, “the choices I make to run my shop are none of the Association’s concern—”

Gabriel tutted. (It had none of the appeal, Crowley noted, of the tut he’d imagined Aziraphale giving him earlier. So. No tut kink, then. Good to know.) “Now, Aziraphale, that’s not the kind of all-in, team-player attitude that makes this neighborhood a great place to shop, is it? And I _know_ you see the value of ensuring that the customer has a consistently on-brand experience while browsing the various establishments—”

“I see the value of ensuring that _small businesses_ are allowed to maintain their _individuality_ and _character.”_

Gabriel smiled rather like someone who’d learned how to do it from a book. “And that’s what makes A.Z. Fell & Co. so great! Wouldn’t want to change the character, not in a million years.”

“Hmmmph,” said Aziraphale. “Why are you here, then? If it’s not to criticize me for my opening hours.”

“Your window displays,” Gabriel said. “Did you see the brochure I sent out about Best Practices for Visual Advertising?”

“I did see it, yes,” Aziraphale said.

“Well, why haven’t you implemented any of the Tips, Tricks, and Helpful Hints yet, then? We want to draw foot traffic _into_ the shops, Aziraphale, and I have to say I don’t think that—” he squinted at one of the books in the window— _“Finnegan’s Wake_ is very appealing to the average passerby.”

“I have _told_ you,” Aziraphale said, “that I have no _intention_ of appealing to the average passerby. I don’t want foot traffic and I don’t want tourists and I don’t want your Tips, Tricks, and Helpful Hints for how to get them! This is a specialty shop. We cater to _collectors._ Enthusiasts. Not just anybody who happens to wander in. It’s bad enough that you’ve mandated we stock _postcards_ now. I flatly _refuse_ to change my _entire_ business model. That Joyce in the window is a _first edition._ It will _absolutely_ bring in the _right_ people.”

Gabriel glanced skeptically at _Finnegan’s Wake._ “If you say so,” he said. “Look, we really don’t want you to be unhappy, Aziraphale. Not at all! We’re here to _help._ Help everyone get the best possible outcome, all right?”

“All right,” Aziraphale said, with the weary acceptance of someone who knows from experience that arguing will do no good. “Is that all, then? I _would_ like to get back to installing my very _modern_ computer system…”

“Yes, that’s all,” Gabriel said, “talk to you soon!”

“I _do_ apologise for him,” Aziraphale told Newt and Crowley as soon as Gabriel had left. 

“Who _is_ that?” Crowley asked. 

“I’m part of a Small Business Association,” Aziraphale said. “It was part of the purchase deal for the shop, back when I first bought it. And really, at first it was—well, still is, in some ways, I suppose—very helpful. Much more...laid-back, about things. But Gabriel took over last year, and it’s been a trifle...ah, different, ever since. I _do_ think he means well,” he hastened to add. “Really I do. But I don’t think he understands the _character_ of my shop. Keeps trying to bring it up to date.”

“But that’s the entire charm of this place,” Crowley said, shaking his head. “The whole...the dust everywhere, and the general lack of organization—” (Aziraphale muttered something about _there’s a very scientific system, actually)_ “—and the staff looking like they’ve time-traveled from the Victorian era, and the, ah, well, the proprietor, looking like...that,” he finished, lamely, and waved a hand in Aziraphale’s general direction while doing his level best to avoid eye contact.

“Well,” said Aziraphale, after a moment, “I’m very—I’m glad you see it that way. I only wish Gabriel did.”

Crowley, whose every nerve was twanging with the sense of Having Gone Too Far, stuck his hands in his pockets and muttered something indistinct and vaguely affirming. 

“Are you done, then, Mr. Fell?” Newt waved tentatively from the counter. “Because I’m just about finished, I only need help with this next bit—”

“Oh—yes, right there, dear boy,” Aziraphale said, and bustled off towards him. 

Crowley glanced up just in time to be left with the warm impression of his smile as he turned away.

While Newt showed Aziraphale (and, once she’d returned, Anathema) the ins and outs of the system’s functionality, Crowley wandered aimlessly around the shop, glancing at the books and various knickknacks on the shelves. 

He hadn’t been lying in the least when he’d told Aziraphale that the charm of the place lay in its disorganization. Despite the fact that the sign over she shop said “Est. 1996,” Crowley could well have believed that it had been there for centuries. It had all the particular comfort of shabbiness, and Crowley couldn’t help but think of the stark contrast with his own minimalist office. It was hardly a fair comparison, of course, he told himself sternly. He’d gone to great lengths to make that office as unwelcoming as possible to clients. But, of course, _he_ was the one who had to spend all day under those fluorescent lights. A.Z. Fell & Co didn’t appear to be inviting by _design—_ and certainly Aziraphale’s comments on his lack of interest in foot traffic cemented that assumption—but it felt that way to Crowley, all the same, the sort of place you could pass hours in without noticing the time had gone by.

“Well, thank you _very_ much, Newton,” Aziraphale was saying as Crowley meandered back around to the counter. “I do believe we have the hang of it now, don’t we, Anathema?”

“I had the hang of it ten minutes ago,” Anathema said, not unkindly. “Thank you, Newton.”

“Really—Newt’s fine,” Newt mumbled. “But. Glad it works. Uh, don’t hesitate to give us a call, if you have any questions…”

“Here’s my card,” Crowley cut in quickly, fumbling in his pockets for the sleek case he kept them in. “Anything you need,” he said, handing the card to Aziraphale. “Really.”

“Yes, well, with the warranty we agreed on, I should hope so,” Aziraphale said, but he placed the card in the pocket of his waistcoat anyway. 

“I s’pose we can be on our way, then,” Crowley said, glancing about in the vague hope that something might appear to detain them. 

“Lovely to meet you, Newt,” Aziraphale said, shaking his hand, “and to see you again, of course, Crowley. And under much less fraught circumstances.”

“Fraught...oh, oh yeah,” Crowley said, remembering the near miss with the baby carriage the last time they’d met. “Get that stain out of your coat all right, then?”

“Oh yes. No harm done. And hopefully some good.”

“Good,” Crowley repeated, and then, because apparently he was going out for the part of Echo in a new adaptation of _D’Aulaires’ Greek Myths,_ “good.”

“Good-bye, then,” Aziraphale said, following them towards the door.

Crowley hovered on the threshold, forcibly repressing a whole heap of feelings that were all out of scope with what “saying good-bye, probably forever, to a strangely fascinating client whom he really didn’t know all that much about and who was probably just Like That with everyone, anyway,” warranted. 

“Good-bye, angel,” he said, at last—because, what the hell, it wasn’t as though he’d be around to find out if it landed awkwardly or not—and headed out to the car, Newt following behind. 


	4. Chapter 4

The days after the A.Z. Fell & Co installation passed with unaccustomed slowness. Crowley felt himself to be more on edge than usual, more ready to snap at Hastur or chew out a tech. He grew particularly devious with his clients, drawing up some of the most fiendish contracts of his career and feeling not a single scrap of remorse. After all, if a stodgy old bookseller who didn’t know the first thing about computers could see through his tricks, surely no one  _ else  _ had any excuse. (Well, perhaps not so  _ very  _ old. Or so very stodgy. But the point stood.)

For some reason, Crowley’s office had become incredibly unpleasant to him. The fluorescent lights shone down on his back like an itch that could never be quite scratched, the boredom manifesting as a jittery physical frustration. The bare walls seemed to be taunting him to throw something at them. He found himself eyeing his meal replacement shake and fantasizing about what it would look like splattered against the eggshell paint, a soupy brown Rorschach blot.

“Right,” he said, aloud, “that’s the limit,” and tossed the shake in the trash on his way out of his office. “Taking a lunch today!” he called in the vague direction of Hastur’s office, in a tone that he hoped conveyed  _ I am informing you of this out of courtesy and not because you have literally any power over me at all. _

He was surprised by how much better he felt just stepping outside: the tension in his shoulders had almost disappeared and his legs lost their stiffness. And even though he’d gone out more out of desperation than anything, he found that he was actually hungry enough to duck into the nearest Pret and pick up a sandwich, which he ate on a park bench while watching a pair of ducks fight over the bread some American tourists were throwing in direct contravention of stated rules.

He brushed the crumbs off of his legs and stood up, not feeling yet ready to return to work and the bleak minimalism of his office. He thought briefly of the interior of A.Z. Fell & Co; of how the worn carpets and dusty stacks, the cushioned chairs and sofas, had conspired to make the place feel homey. Inviting. 

Would it really be such a bad thing, Crowley wondered, if his office felt ever-so-slightly more comfortable? Never mind the years of careful calculation that had gone into making the place as repellent as possible; didn’t Crowley have enough faith in his own abilities to be able to dispense with such flourishes in exchange for a bit more comfort? Surely he could add...something, to make the place a bit more liveable. A plant, maybe? Crowley could see himself getting on with a plant. He could get something frightening-looking, like a Venus flytrap or a Devil’s claw. It might even  _ add  _ to the ambiance, if he played it right.

There was a plant shop a few minutes’ walk away, and Crowley set off at a brisker-than-usual pace, intent on getting there before his lunch hour was up. But just as he was approaching his destination, he caught sight of another shop, a few doors down from the plant place—an odds-and-ends type of store, with antique lamps and an  _ unbelievably  _ ugly china cat figurine in the display window. It was completely revolting to Crowley’s aesthetic sensibilities.

He went in.

The interior of the shop was even worse than the outside—there were neon keychains, and those license-plate magnets with names pre-printed on them, and incredibly ornate picture frames.

“Good afternoon!” the proprietress beamed from behind the counter. “Can I help you with anything, young man?”

“Ah—just browsing, thanks,” said Crowley, and instantly regretted it, because now he had to  _ browse.  _

_ Should’ve just gone for the plants,  _ he thought grimly, picking up a doll that looked rather like one of Disney’s less successful animatronics and turning it over in his hands in mock-contemplation. It had been a silly idea, coming in here, just because it reminded him of—

“Crowley?”

Crowley spun on his heel, overdid it, and ended up very nearly toppling over. “Aaah,” he said, once he’d righted himself. “Aziraphale! Hello.”

“Fancy seeing you here,” Aziraphale said, with evident sincerity. “I shouldn’t have thought it was—ah—your sort of place.”

“Oh—yeah—no,” Crowley said. “Just going for a walk, thought I’d drop in and see what was on offer. I’m...thinking of redecorating. Just a bit. My office,” he clarified. (Crowley’s flat shared the minimalist ethos of his office, but the colour scheme was much less “bright fluorescent white” and much more “dark leather,” and all the furniture was  _ extremely  _ comfortable as well as sleek in appearance.)

“Are you really?” Aziraphale asked. “I do seem to remember it being a trifle...bare.”

“Yeah,” Crowley said, “that’s—accurate. What about you? Come here often?” He winced internally.

Aziraphale, mercifully, took the question at face value. “Oh yes,” he said. “This shop’s part of the same Small Business Association as I am, you know, and I like to support my fellow merchants. Even if—” he glanced theatrically around before leaning in towards Crowley and lowering his voice— “some of the wares are  _ exceedingly  _ tacky.”

“Really?” Crowley asked, grinning. “You don’t think, uh, this  _ It’s A Small World  _ reject is an undiscovered gem? Diamond in the rough?” He waggled the doll in Aziraphale’s face.

“I do not, in fact,” Aziraphale said firmly. “There is a difference between eccentricity and kitsch, and I strive always to remain on the appropriate side of the line.”

“That’d be the kitsch side, then, would it?”

Aziraphale sighed dramatically. “It’s just as I imagined,” he said, in tones of overwrought sorrow. “You’re only charming towards  _ prospective  _ clients. Now that you’ve got me...locked down, as it were, there’s no more need for wooing and I shall have to take the brunt of your wit.”

“Hang on,” Crowley said, filing the  _ charming  _ bit away for later consideration, “you’d already signed the contract when I came to help with the installation, and I think I was perfectly personable then—”

“Were you?” Aziraphale asked. “I seem to remember you accusing me of being a  _ front  _ for something. You were, however, very kind about my shop after Gabriel came to critique it.”

“We at Barathrum Systems strive to defend our clients against the unfounded smears of any and all Small Business Association Presidents who might come their way.”

“I’m very glad of it,” Aziraphale said quietly, and smiled.

Crowley cleared his throat. “So. Uh. Buying anything today, then?”

Aziraphale drifted over towards the licence-plate magnets. “Well,” he said, mock-thoughtfully, “I  _ had  _ intended to pick up one of these very charming decorations, but it seems they don’t have my name.”

“No,” Crowley said, gasping a little. “You don’t mean to say that  _ Aziraphale,  _ the name that we all know is sweeping the nation, doesn’t come pre-printed on these little numbers?”

“It would appear to have been left out,” Aziraphale said. “An unconscionable omission, to my mind.”

“Mmm,” Crowley said, spinning round the display case to look at the different options. “Well, they’ve got Anthony, anyway, so I’m all set—”

“Don’t  _ rub it in—” _

“And,” he continued, peeling one of the magnets off and handing it to Aziraphale, “here’s one for you.”

Aziraphale looked down at the magnet in his hand.

“Angel,” he read. “Really—” He turned slightly pink, and was quiet.

“Sorry,” Crowley said, quickly, “um, I’d thought it was a bit of a joke because of the, the woman, with the baby carriage, and all, but it’s completely inappropriate, I’m—”

“Oh, no,” Aziraphale said, softly. “I, ah—I rather like it, actually.”

“Oh,” Crowley said, and now it was his turn to be (rather stupidly) silent.

Aziraphale carefully stuck the ANGEL magnet back onto the display. “I do, however, intend to hold out for my  _ actual  _ name, when it comes to these. It simply isn’t worth it otherwise.”

“No, I suppose not,” Crowley said. “Um. Well, it’s always a pleasure to run into a client, but I do actually have to be getting back to the office now, so…”

“Oh—yes, quite right,” Aziraphale said. “I ought to be back at my shop, Anathema will be wondering where I’ve got to…”

“I’ll see you around, then.”

“Will you?” Aziraphale asked, and for a moment Crowley had the ridiculous notion that he was actually  _ asking,  _ that he wanted Crowley to, to reassure him that this wouldn’t be the last time they met.

“Oh yes,” Crowley said, as breezily as possible. He held up the doll. “It’s a small world, after all.”

* * *

Crowley did end up buying a plant for his office. It helped at least a  _ bit,  _ giving him something to glance at throughout the day. He had to admit that it could be nice, having another living thing there. Made you understand why people got pets. (Crowley had never had a pet, largely because he had the nagging suspicion that somewhere deep inside of him lurked an Intense Pet Person, and he hadn’t the slightest desire to let them out. It seemed likely to be embarrassing for everyone involved.)

Nor did the plant stand in the way of Crowley’s success with clients. In fact, he found that if he muttered vaguely menacing things to it under his breath while pretending not to realize that the client was within earshot, it spooked them sufficiently to inspire even quicker signatures.

So, overall, Crowley was extremely pleased with his plant purchase. He was also, unfortunately, extremely prone to overanalysis of the trinket-shop visit that had preceded it. It had been Crowley’s first time seeing Aziraphale outside of their skirmishes over the software, the first time without an external agenda, and Crowley was forced to admit to himself that the strange fascination Aziraphale held for him was apparently not exclusively professional. Because—it hadn’t been the thrill of contract negotiation that had caused Crowley’s heart to pound upon hearing Aziraphale’s voice. It hadn’t been the drive to get one over on a client that had prompted him to hand Aziraphale that ANGEL magnet. No, it had been  _ personal,  _ because apparently Crowley had a  _ crush.  _ A ridiculous, infantile term for a ridiculous, infantile feeling about a ridiculous, really-not-infantile-at-all person. (But then, what else could you call it, really? He wasn’t in  _ love  _ with Aziraphale. Yet. And  _ like  _ didn’t seem to encompass the level of sheer panicked attraction that Crowley felt.)

But despite what he’d said to Aziraphale at the shop, Crowley felt by no means certain that they would meet again anytime soon. Not without a level of active decision-making on Crowley’s part that felt wholly unwarranted under the current circumstances. Because while dating a client wasn’t strictly  _ forbidden  _ under the rules at Barathrum, it nevertheless introduced a whole host of very sticky problems (not the fun kind of sticky, either) into the professional relationship. It wasn’t a thing to be jumped into lightly, and while Crowley might have come to terms with the nature of his feelings, he wasn’t yet ready to rate their intensity at a level that would justify crossing that line.

So he indulged in daydreams about running into Aziraphale again, maybe picking up a bottle of something at the off-licence, and oh, what do you know, Crowley had just been about to get that very same wine, wouldn’t it be more economical if they shared it? His flat was just up the road… 

And he replayed their several meetings over and over again in his mind, combing them over for evidence of reciprocation (attraction was there, surely? And yet it was altogether too easy to magnify the slightest hints into convincing arguments). But he didn’t, as yet,  _ do  _ anything about it. There simply wasn’t much of anything  _ to  _ be done.

Until, as Crowley was returning from the morning sales team check-in, his phone rang.

“Anthony Crowley.”

“Oh, I’ve got you! That is—I’d thought perhaps you wouldn’t be at your desk.”

“Aziraphale?”

“Yes, that’s right. I  _ do  _ hope it’s not an imposition, you  _ did  _ say to call any time—”

“Not an imposition at all,” Crowley said. “What can I do for you, angel?”

“Ah. Well. It seems that the computer system I purchased from you is...defective.”

“What? No,” Crowley said, reflexively. “I mean—I was there, it installed just fine, was working perfectly—”

“Yes, but now it  _ isn’t,  _ you see. I keep trying to scan in books and it simply won’t accept them.”

“Let me try to say this politely. Are you  _ certain  _ it’s not user error? You’ve got it turned on and everything?”

_ “Yes,  _ Crowley, I’ve got it  _ turned on,  _ really, how incompetent do you think I  _ am?” _

“We-ell,” Crowley said, drawing the vowel out, “I wouldn’t say  _ incompetent.  _ Perhaps technologically challenged. _ ” _

“Besides, Anathema couldn’t get it to work either. So it  _ can’t  _ be user error, can it?”

“Does lower the odds a bit,” Crowley conceded.

“Well, it’s really  _ most  _ inconvenient,” Aziraphale said. “We’d just got the hang of it properly, and now I’m back to counting out change by hand. Although it  _ does  _ put off some customers. So I suppose it’s not  _ all  _ bad.”

“Oh, well, in  _ that  _ case—”

“Will you send someone along, then? To look at it?”

“Ah—listen,” Crowley said, clicking his pen rapidly against the top of his desk, “why don’t I come by? Right now? Save you having to wait till one of the repair crew’s available. I’m not a tech, of course, but I know enough about the system that I should be able to tell if it’s actually broken or just, erm. Something else.”

“I’ve told you already,  _ I’ve got it turned on—” _

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway. Does now work?”

“Given that I’m entirely unable to operate my business properly at the moment, I should say now works, yes.” 

“Terrific,” Crowley said, already standing up. “Be right there.”

* * *

The sign on the door of A.Z. Fell & Co was flipped to CLOSED, and Crowley hovered indecisively for a moment outside before telling himself sternly that he wasn’t a  _ customer,  _ and anyway Aziraphale was expecting him. Still, though, it was a bit of a relief to see his expression change from annoyance to pleasure as Aziraphale looked up at the sound of the bell and saw Crowley.

“Oh, good, you’re here,” he said.

“Decided just to close up?” Crowley asked, indicating the sign with a jerk of his thumb.

“Well, yes. I mean—it’s not as though anything I sold while the system was down would update in the inventory tracker, and I thought of trying to keep notes on paper but there really  _ is  _ so much room for error with that, and I really just thought it would be  _ safer  _ to close until you were able to come by and rescue me.”

“Or, alternatively, you were looking for any excuse to shut up shop for the afternoon and decided this was good enough?”

“May have been a bit of that, yes,” Aziraphale admitted. 

“Aren’t you the sole proprietor?” Crowley asked. “Can’t you just close whenever you like?”

Aziraphale heaved a sigh. “Unfortunately, no. I  _ used  _ to do that, back when I first opened this place—would have a solid three days a week that were By Appointment Only. Saved me having to deal with browsers and made the serious buyers feel more important; I may actually have made  _ more  _ profit those days.”

“So why don’t you anymore?”

“Small Business Association regulations,” Aziraphale said glumly. “We all have Core Hours that we need to be open in order to Provide A Seamlessly Efficient Shopping Experience for the Purchase-Minded Consumer.”

“Eurgh,” said Crowley. “Gabriel again?”

“Oh yes. He sent out a whole leaflet about it. I burned it,” Aziraphale said, perking up a bit. “It looked lovely, going up in flames.”

“Aren’t you bloody-minded,” Crowley said approvingly. “Well, anyway, as much as we at Barathrum Systems are happy to provide you with any excuse to tell the SBA to sod off because your POS is malfunctioning, I think I  _ had  _ better take a look at the system, yeah?”

“Oh, please,” Aziraphale said, gesturing to the computer, and Crowley joined him behind the till. “Can I get you anything to drink? Cup of tea? Glass of water? I think I’ve got some lemonade in the refrigerator—”

“Tea’s fine, thanks,” Crowley said quickly, less because he actually wanted tea and more to see the delighted smile that overtook Aziraphale’s face.

“I’ll just put the kettle on, then.”

While Aziraphale headed to the kitchenette, Crowley bent down and began inspecting the POS system. It was, in fact, turned on, so that was a point to Aziraphale there, anyway. He fiddled with a few of the settings, opening menus and ticking and unticking boxes, but by the time Aziraphale returned with the tea, he’d more-or-less exhausted all available options, and the system still wasn’t scanning books properly.

“Not  _ user error  _ after all, then?” Aziraphale asked, with the cattiness that Crowley probably deserved. 

“Apparently not,” he admitted, accepting the tea. “Thanks, angel.” 

“Of course,” Aziraphale said. His cheeks were slightly flushed—probably, Crowley told himself sternly, from the heat of the tea. “Do sit down, please, it doesn’t seem as though it’s going to be a quick fix, so you may as well be comfortable.”

This sounded suspiciously like Aziraphale was casting aspersions upon Crowley’s ability to fix the system, but his expression radiated only aggressive hospitality. Crowley sat down on the indicated sofa, which was unsurprisingly comfortable. 

“Yeah,” he said, as Aziraphale sat down in his own chair, turning the angle slightly away from his desk to face Crowley, “I’m not entirely sure what’s wrong, to be honest. I’ve got a few more things to try” —he did not— “and then if that doesn’t work out, I’ll call in a tech, see if we can get someone down here today or tomorrow. Definitely by next week, though.”

“Next  _ week?”  _ Aziraphale asked. “Much as I might, ah, appreciate the time without customers, I really  _ don’t  _ want to be closed for more than a few days.”

“Really,” Crowley said, grinning, “it’s almost as though you don’t have confidence in my ability to sort this out for you right now.”

“I beg your pardon,” Aziraphale said, with arch politeness. “Please, astound me.”

“Oh, angel,” Crowley said, putting more honey into his tone than was strictly necessary, “just sit back and let me blow your mind.”

“Only my mind?”

Crowley made a noise like a goat undergoing a particularly painful appendectomy and spilt tea all over himself.

“Yowch,” he said, leaping up and putting the teacup down on the table with more than necessary force, “oh, God, sorry—”

“Oh,  _ dear,”  _ Aziraphale said, standing up at once, “I  _ do  _ hope it’s not too painful—here, let me just—” He hurried over to the kitchenette and returned with a wad of paper towels. Crowley reached out a hand to take them from him, but Aziraphale brushed straight past and began (rather ineffectually) dabbing at the damp spots on Crowley’s shirt. 

“Um,” Crowley said, after about a minute of frantic patting, “I don’t think—”

“Hmm?” Aziraphale looked up, and oh, okay, their faces were  _ very  _ close together, and Aziraphale’s hand had stilled on one of the wet patches near the top of Crowley’s chest, and the paper towel was pressing into his skin and what had been scalding tea was turning cold against Crowley’s skin but he barely noticed, because Aziraphale was letting out a soft breath that ghosted across Crowley’s collarbone, warm and gentle, and surely,  _ surely  _ he could feel the way Crowley’s heart had started to hammer, what with his hand being right there. And yet he wasn’t moving away—if anything, the pressure of his hand against Crowley’s chest increased—and it would be incredibly easy for Crowley to do something very unprofessional and presumptuous and stupid.

Instead, he wrapped a hand around Aziraphale’s, prying it gently off of his chest. “Don’t think that’s working,” he explained, letting go of Aziraphale’s hand, stepping back, and pulling the hem of his shirt out of his trousers to illustrate. The tea had soaked through, leaving behind oddly shaped, unpleasantly damp brown stains.

“Oh,” said Aziraphale. “You’re quite right, I’m so sorry, I—”

“It’s fine! It’s fine,” Crowley said. “You tried.”

Aziraphale looked him up and down with rather more care than might have been expected for someone merely checking for stains. “Perhaps you’d better, erm, just take it off…?”

He’d gone all pink, and this time Crowley  _ highly  _ doubted it was from the tea. 

“Don’t know why you think inviting me to disrobe is an appropriate response to this situation,” he said, grinning widely.

“Inviting you to—oh. I see. Very, erm, very clever of you,” Aziraphale said, still not looking up. “Because of the—baby. Yes. And my coat.”

He was actually  _ flustered. _ Crowley wanted desperately to take advantage of this and say something sardonic and clever.

“Yeah, because of that,” he said, resoundingly failing to hit either target.

“Look, you really  _ can’t  _ be going about like that,” Aziraphale said, seemingly regaining some of his composure. “Why don’t I nip upstairs and get you a, a jumper, or something, and you can go in the toilet and change.”

Crowley’s strong suspicion that a jumper from Aziraphale’s wardrobe would clash horribly with his personal aesthetic warred with his burning curiosity to find out whether said jumper might possibly smell like Aziraphale.

“Thanks,” he said, “that would—if you don’t mind—”

“Of course not,” Aziraphale said, wiping his hands off with the remainder of the paper towels and tossing them in the bin. “It’s the least I can do. It  _ is  _ my fault you’re all covered in tea, after all.”

“What—no,” Crowley said. “Not your fault.”

“Oh?” Aziraphale asked, motioning for Crowley to follow him through a narrow doorway. “I rather thought that something I said might have, erm. Startled you.”

“Nope,” Crowley said decisively. “All my own fault. Completely self-directed clumsiness. Nothing whatever to do with you.”

“Mmm,” said Aziraphale. “Here’s the toilet, then, I’ll just be a moment.” He gestured to the small wooden door at the end of the corridor and vanished back the way they’d come.

Crowley shrugged off his suit jacket, folding it neatly over the grab bar (the fact that Aziraphale had apparently retrofitted the shop for wheelchair accessibility was not remotely surprising), and unbuttoned his shirt, taking it off and holding it up to the light to see just how bad the stains were.

Then, in a fit of sudden inspiration, he dug in his trouser pocket for his mobile and placed a quick call.

“Newton Pulsifer speaking.”

“Newt! Hey. Listen, do you have a sec?” Crowley pitched his voice low enough that Aziraphale (hopefully) wouldn’t be able to hear it.

“Uh, sure, Crowley, what can I—”

“Great. You remember that installation we did? Old bookshop? System’s not scanning, and I can’t figure out what’s wrong.”

“Hmm,” Newt said. “Should I come down and take a look, or…”

“No,” Crowley said, quickly, “no, no, um, I was thinking maybe you could just sort of...walk me through it? Tell me what to do to fix it? I’ve reset everything already, turned it off and on, all that sort of thing.”

“All right,” Newt said, “um...okay, so if it’s not scanning it’s probably one of three things…”

He outlined the most likely scenarios in surprisingly clear and concise terms. Crowley never failed to be shocked by how much Newt actually  _ knew  _ about technology, given his propensity to make a hash of practical applications. 

“Thanks,” he said, and, hearing footsteps heading downstairs, “got to go, bye—”

“Crowley?” Aziraphale tapped lightly on the door.

“Ah, yeah, hey,” Crowley said, and opened the door. 

Aziraphale’s eyes widened, and Crowley realized abruptly that he’d stripped down to his vest and neglected to put anything else back on.

“Sorry,” he said, quickly, “I didn’t—”

“It’s quite all right,” Aziraphale said, voice coming out a bit choked, and thrust a wooly jumper into his hands.

“Thanks,” Crowley said, closing the door again to avoid further mortification.

He looked at the jumper in his hands. It was, as feared, extremely Not His Style; bright blue and patterned with thin pink lines in a diamond pattern. Surreptitiously (even though no one was watching) he lifted it to his nose and sniffed gently, feeling like some unholy combination of a sex-crazed pervert and an overly sentimental auntie. It did, in fact, smell like Aziraphale, like whatever cologne it was Crowley had been breathing in when they’d been standing close earlier, as well as an earthier undercurrent of something that felt more personal and organic.

Crowley, aware that he had been taking more time to put on a jumper than any human being could conceivably need (hopefully Aziraphale didn’t think he was doing anything  _ creepy  _ in the toilet. Like, for example, smelling his jumper), pulled it quickly over his head and gathered his stained shirt and suit jacket in his arms.

Aziraphale beamed when he saw him. “That’s better, now, isn’t it?”

“Oh yeah, terrific,” Crowley said. “Really gives off the cutting-edge man-about-town vibe that I aim for.”

“Yes, I think you look very handsome, too,” Aziraphale said, which was  _ deeply  _ unfair.

“Anyway. I’ve, uh, got a few more ideas for what I can try with your system, so…”

“Oh yes, splendid,” Aziraphale said. “I’ll just leave you to it, then, shall I?”

“Please,” Crowley said, relieved that he wasn’t going to have to fumble his way through Newt’s instructions while Aziraphale watched.

While Crowley tried out the various repair strategies he’d just learnt, Aziraphale pottered around the bookshop, humming tunelessly to himself and moving books from one place to another with no apparent rhyme or reason. Crowley found this simultaneously extremely irritating and offensively charming in its utter lack of efficiency.

Still, it made a pleasant enough background while he worked on the POS system, which seemed to be responding well to the second of Newt’s suggested methods. He’d just about finished with it when the bookshop phone rang.

Aziraphale darted over to answer it. “A.Z. Fell & Co, Antiquarian and Un—oh.” His voice went icy. “I believe I have asked you on  _ several  _ prior occasions to stop calling this number. I remain as uninterested in your proposition as ever. Good  _ day,”  _ he said, and replaced the receiver firmly.

“Who was  _ that?”  _

Aziraphale shook his head. “It’s only—some conglomerate or other, I believe. They’ve been hounding me for months trying to get me to sell the shop, to put in some dreadful, I don’t know, i-Store or Apple Express or whatever you call them. I’ve told them I’ve no interest in selling, but, well. They persevere.”

He looked slightly exhausted, saying this, and Crowley was torn between the urge to pry further and the fear of crossing a line.

“Think I’ve fixed this, anyway,” he settled for saying.

It seemed to have been the right choice, as Aziraphale lit up. “Oh,  _ have  _ you?”

“Give it a go,” Crowley said, handing him a book and stepping aside. 

Aziraphale scanned the book through the system. It emitted a wholly satisfactory  _ ding,  _ and Crowley mentally fist-pumped.

“Oh,  _ wonderful,”  _ Aziraphale said, “it  _ does  _ seem to be working, I’m dreadfully sorry to have doubted you and I’m  _ very  _ grateful you should have taken the time out of your day to come by.  _ Most  _ kind of you.”

Crowley scratched the bridge of his nose. “No trouble.”

“Really,” Aziraphale continued, “I don’t know  _ how  _ I can thank you—”

“It’s fine!” Crowley said, because being complimented made him itchy. “Really. Uh. Just my job.”

Aziraphale’s face seemed to dim slightly. “Yes, of course,” he said, with markedly less enthusiasm. 

Crowley, aware that he’d gone wrong somewhere but entirely unable to discern  _ how,  _ drummed his fingers on the counter. “I’d better be getting back, then. Client meeting coming up,” he lied.

“Don’t let me keep you,” Aziraphale said, still with that slight chill in his voice. “Thank you, again.”

Crowley collected his things and headed for the door. “Anytime, angel,” he said, and glanced back to see that Aziraphale was smiling again.

He drove back to the office, still mulling that last encounter over. Perhaps he’d cut Aziraphale off too abruptly. But, really, all that going on about  _ how can I ever thank you— _

There  _ wasn’t,  _ Crowley wondered, any chance that Aziraphale had been...hinting, or something,  _ was  _ there?

No. Surely not. And even if he  _ had  _ been, Crowley had gone right ahead and trampled all over it, so there  _ really  _ wasn’t any point in dwelling on it.

It wasn’t as though there was anything he could  _ do  _ about it, he thought, walking through the Barathrum entrance and towards the Sales area. 

Hastur snorted when he saw him. “Nice jumper.”

Crowley, who’d entirely forgotten what he was wearing, looked down. “Thanks. It was, uh, it was a loan, actually. I’m—” he felt a grin break across his face as he realized— “gonna have to return it.”


	5. Chapter 5

The jumper (appropriately laundered) stayed in Crowley’s wardrobe for the better part of a week while he debated what he ought to do with it. Well—return it, obviously, it wasn’t as though he were a thief _._ (And if he _were_ a thief, he’d obviously have a better business model than “obtain jumpers from kindly booksellers and hoard them like wooly, unfashionable trophies.” It would be more along the lines of “elaborate, high-tech heist involving codenames and a watch that could blow things up.”)

But, all right, he had to return the jumper. He considered just popping it in the post and sending it back—with or without a note which he would no doubt agonize over writing—which was likely the _safest_ option. No need to go back to A.Z. Fell & Co, no potential for further beverage incidents, no opportunity to further embarrass himself. And no chance to see Aziraphale again.

That last bit, of course, was the sticking point. Because while the jumper languished unreturned, Crowley had been replaying the events leading up to its acquisition over and over again in his mind, and had come to the nigh-unshakable conviction that Aziraphale had, in fact, been flirting with him.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, Crowley was not an idiot. He was _good_ at reading people. You didn’t get to where he was (i.e, highest commission-earner at Barathrum Systems) without learning to pick up what others were putting down. And he couldn’t exactly be accused of having low self-esteem, or of chronically underestimating his own attractiveness. 

There was, however, something about Aziraphale Fell that apparently shorted out whatever sections of his brain were responsible for these traits, because Crowley had so far demonstrated a complete lack of ability to think clearly around him. But with time and distance, he was able to look back upon their interaction with a more rational mind, and either he’d gone _completely_ off his rocker (always a possibility) or Aziraphale had been _interested._ He’d been practically waggling his eyebrows when he’d asked whether there was any way he could _thank_ Crowley, like something out of an extremely niche pornographic film for steampunk fetishists, and Crowley, without realizing, had stomped all over the moment.

If he returned the jumper in person, then, he’d get another go at it. He could stroll on in, say something witty (to be workshopped later), produce the sweater, call Aziraphale “angel,” watch him blush and flutter his eyelashes and smile slyly, and finish it up by asking whether he couldn’t take him out to dinner one of these days. He wouldn’t even be on the clock, for once; could spend however long he wanted working up to it, without feeling like he needed to push Barathrum’s agenda. 

So it wasn’t, after all, a particularly difficult choice. No reward without risk, after all, and where the reward was “potential date with current object of obsession” and the risk was “potential humiliation in front of selfsame object of obsession,” the calculation was pretty obviously worth it.

Crowley reached this decision with relative rapidity, but his work schedule (or perhaps just Hastur) seemed determined to conspire against him. His calendar was packed full with client meetings, contract reviews, a professional development seminar that sounded like an _immense_ load of garbage (or, you know, sounded like a professional development seminar), and even a Sales team lunch. Barely an hour to himself to catch up on paperwork, and certainly no time to pop over to Soho and do a bit of textile-assisted wooing. He wasn’t actually worried that Aziraphale would lose interest—although Crowley had been surprised by him at every turn, he was fairly certain that his assessment of Aziraphale as steady and sincere was accurate. But he’d left the ball in Crowley’s court, and with every passing day he must be wondering whether Crowley was rude or just dense.

“Hey!” Ligur tapped on Crowley’s open office door.

“Yeah?” Crowley snapped, barely looking up from the document open on his computer.

“You’ve got mail,” Ligur said, waving an envelope back and forth.

“It’s just junk, all we ever get here is junk. All _anyone_ gets in the post these days in junk.”

“This one’s hand-addressed, though,” Ligur said, and tossed the envelope towards Crowley’s desk. Ligur not having particularly good aim, it landed in the plant.

Crowley groaned and rolled his chair over towards the plant, picking the envelope out of its leaves. “That all?”

“Actually,” Ligur said, “I think _we_ should start doing handwritten notes to our clients, would really make them feel special—”

“I’ve seen your handwriting,” Crowley said. “All it would make them feel is eye strain.”

Ligur scowled. “Well, I’m bringing it up at the next team meeting, anyway,” he said, and stalked away.

Crowley glanced at his letter. He’d half-expected it to be typed in one of those shitty “handwriting” fonts, because he didn’t really trust Ligur to know the difference, but, sure enough, it was neatly hand-addressed to Anthony Crowley, Barathrum Systems. He flipped it over to open it, and saw that it was sealed with wax.

Crowley frowned at it for a moment, thinking, and then broke into a grin. 

Because who did he know who would send a _handwritten letter_ and use _sealing wax?_

He used one of his car keys to pry up the wax and open the envelope.

_Dear Crowley,_

_I write by way of thanking you once again for your assistance in the matter of my faulty computer system. While I still maintain that there must have been some error with the installation for it to fail so quickly, I am forced to rescind any suspicions of intentional wrongdoing on your part due to your helpfulness in fixing it. I would apologise for thinking ill of you, but I have the notion you might find it rather flattering than otherwise to be considered devious._

_I should also like to reiterate my apologies for the tea incident. I do hope you weren’t made uncomfortable by my attempts to assist._

_Pray don’t feel you have to hurry to return my jumper. I have plenty more like it._

_Sincerely yours,_

_A.Z. Fell_

“Bastard,” Crowley said, grinning stupidly at the last line. It was ridiculous that he should be so charmed by such blatant passive-aggressive hinting, but there you had it. 

_Pray don’t feel you have to hurry—_ he could hear Aziraphale’s voice saying it, the exaggerated warmth, the prim edge to his tone. As though he knew perfectly well that telling Crowley not to do something was the number-one guaranteed best way to get him to do it.

He opened his calendar and clicked through the rest of the day. One more client meeting this afternoon, and not one he could easily reschedule. Unless…

Crowley printed off a document and stood up, grabbing it on his way out of his office. Hastur’s door was open, and Crowley gave it a perfunctory knock, not waiting for permission before walking in.

“Hastur,” he said, brandishing the sheaf of papers he’d printed out. “Got something for you.”

Hastur took the papers with a sour expression (this was completely non-indicative, given the general pH of Hastur’s face). “This is just one of your contracts, isn’t it?”

“Oh no,” Crowley said, smiling. “It’s one of _your_ contracts.”

“Huh?”

“See, Hastur, I got a message just now, from Leviathan head office. They told me this meeting’s liable to be a tricky one, client might need some real work done on ‘em, and they said, you know who’s the man for the job, it’s Hastur. Good on you, you know, really movin’ up in the world, first team lead, now the hardest contracts, wouldn’t be surprised if they were grooming you for management somewhere.”

Hastur frowned. “Head office contacted _you?”_

“Well, ‘s still technically my client, isn’t it, they wanted to make sure I knew about it. Told me to tell you. Oh, and, I mean, it’ll still be my name on the account, and everything, but the people who matter’ll know that you were the one who really did it.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah,” Crowley said. “Hastur, coming in to save the day. Should look impressive to those in the know.”

“All right,” Hastur said, flipping through the pages of the contract. “Do I need to review this, too, or—”

“No,” Crowley said, quickly. “No, that should all be fine, all they need you to do is get the signature.”

Hastur’s face contorted in what Crowley gradually realized was supposed to be a patronizing smile. “Now, what have I told you, Crowley, it’s not just about getting a _signature,_ it’s about _building a relationship.”_

“You’re completely right,” Crowley said, tapping the edge of Hastur’s desk. “Definitely gonna work on my client relationships.”

* * *

Ten minutes later, and he was on the road to A.Z. Fell & Co, jumper folded neatly in a bag on the passenger seat. Not a bad bit of work, really. As long as Hastur didn’t entirely muck up the meeting, the client would still sign Crowley’s contract, and he’d still get the credit—and, more importantly, the commission. What he would do once Hastur figured out that there _hadn’t_ been a request from the higher-ups was a problem for Future Crowley. Present Crowley had more important things to worry about.

He parked the car and got out, grabbing the bag with the jumper. One of the shops on this side of the street had a window large enough to serve as an impromptu mirror, and Crowley studied himself for a moment, adjusting the hang of his jacket and patting down his hair with a hand. 

“Right,” he said, under his breath. “Let’s go.”

He gripped the handle of the bag tighter, and walked into A.Z. Fell & Co as casually as possible.

The clerk girl—Anathema?—was behind the counter, ringing up the only other customer in the place. Crowley avoided eye contact as he walked by, pretending to be extremely interested in a shelf of Georgette Heyer but actually scanning the surroundings for Aziraphale. 

There was no sign of him, though, so Crowley lurked awkwardly until the other customer had left and then approached the counter.

“Oh, you’re the—the computer guy. Crowley?”

“Yeah,” Crowley said. “I was just wondering if Az—if Mr. Fell is here?”

Anathema shook her head. “No, he’s not scheduled to be in this afternoon. Said there was an auction he wanted to attend, get some more stock in. But if you’ve got something to do with the POS, please, go ahead, I’m authorized to do whatever needs to be done so that Aziraphale doesn’t have to think about it. Or, if there’s something you need me to give him, or a message—what did you need him for?”

Crowley glanced instinctively downward at the bag in his hands. Giving it to Anathema to pass on was obviously out of the question, not when the whole point of this little excursion had been the chance to see Aziraphale again.

“Oh, nah, I actually—I’m not here to _see_ him, just thought, _since_ I was here, I’d ask if he was in. Opportunity to do a little client check-in. That’s all.”

“Okay, so you’re here to…”

“Shop!” Crowley said, pasting what had to be a patently fake smile on his face. “Uh, yeah, just gonna—browse around a bit—”

Anathema nodded, and he worried for a moment that she might offer to help him find what he was looking for, but she merely said, “Let me know when you’re ready to check out, then, or if you need help with anything,” and flipped open the extremely large leather-bound book she had with her.

Crowley wandered around the shop, aimlessly picking books up and putting them down. He’d call ahead, next time, that’s what he’d do, he’d call until he got Aziraphale and _knew_ he was in, could just hear the _hello_ on the phone, wouldn’t even need to reveal himself. (Did any of the old anti-caller-ID tricks still work? Although, judging by the apparent age of the shop phone, that might be a non-issue entirely.)

That settled, there wasn’t much reason to stick around, then, was there? He grabbed the nearest book without really looking at the title and brought it up to the counter. 

“Just this, thanks,” he said, pulling out his wallet.

“Sure, no problem,” Anathema said, and picked up the book. Her face twitched, like she was trying not to smile. “I’ll just ring this up—”

The bell jangled. “Well, I must say _that_ was a waste of time, they didn’t have _any_ of the volumes I was interested in—oh. Crowley!”

“Hey,” Crowley said, weakly.

“This is a pleasant surprise,” Aziraphale said, “and is that—”

“Your jumper, yeah,” Crowley said, handing him the bag. Their fingers brushed slightly.

Anathema snorted.

“Urk,” Crowley said, turning back towards her, “and I was also, uh, just buying—”

Aziraphale tilted his head to peer at the title. “ _What’s All The Buzz About: Beeswax Dildos for the DIY Enthusiast?”_

“Oh, God,” Crowley said, reflexively. “Um—”

“Why _on earth_ are you buying _that?”_

“Why are _you_ selling it?” Crowley demanded. “Odd sort of book to have in a place like this, isn’t it?” A thought struck him. “This isn’t—you haven’t been, what, just _waiting_ to see who buys this book, like some sort of—fetish Cinderella situation, some kind of bizarre literary mating call, looking out for anyone who shares that interest—”

“What? No!” Aziraphale looked somewhere between amused and offended. “Of course not, that would be—well, for one thing, wildly unprofessional, and for another, do you really think that _beeswax dildos_ are likely to be an area of interest for me—”

“You’ve got it in your shop!”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, “as a _joke,_ or, well, what happened was, Gabriel told me I’d better start stocking some more _modern_ books, and I was feeling rather fed up with him that day and he never specified what _sort_ of modern books, so I ordered an...assortment.”

“Of course you did.”

“Still,” Aziraphale said, “far be it from me to judge anyone for their—interests—”

Anathema, who had been visibly trying not to laugh since Aziraphale had read the book’s title, evidently gave up the fight at this juncture.

“Oh— _really,”_ Aziraphale said, in faintly disapproving tones. “My dear girl—”

“Sorry,” Anathema said, between giggles, “but come _on—”_

“I think perhaps you’d better take your break now,” Aziraphale said firmly.

Anathema’s eyes darted to Crowley. “Oh—sure.”

“Don’t hurry back!” Aziraphale called after her. “Now then, I _do_ apologise for her—”

Crowley shook his head. “Nah, I mean, it’s a book about _beeswax dildos,_ so.”

“It is indubitably that. Shall I still ring you up, or—”

“Nah. That’s—I’m all set.”

“Mmm,” Aziraphale said. “Probably wise. Well, thank you _very_ much for returning my jumper so promptly, I _do_ appreciate it.”

“Oh, yeah, course,” Crowley said, scratching the back of his neck. “Thanks for lending it. And for the, the note.”

“Oh, you got that, then.”

“Yeah. I did. Um. Look. Aziraphale—”

“Yes?”

“Would you like to have dinner sometime? With me.”

Aziraphale’s face bloomed into a smile that could likely have powered several large commercial aircraft. “Oh, _finally,_ I was _hoping_ you’d get around to asking—”

“Hang on,” Crowley said, “what d’you mean, _finally?”_

“Well, simply that there’s been a rather evident, ah, _frisson_ for some time, I should say, and I’d wondered whether you had any intention of acting on it.”

“Bu—wh—” Crowley sputtered. 

“What? I should imagine it’s been clear to you as well, otherwise you wouldn’t have—”

“I—well, yeah, but you didn’t have to wait for _me,_ did you, could’ve said something _yourself,_ if you thought the thing was so _evident—”_

“No, of course not, that would _scarcely_ have been appropriate,” Aziraphale said. “I am your _client._ It would be highly improper for _me_ to approach _you_ , not when you depend upon my business. Certainly not while you were actively _working.”_

“H’m,” Crowley said. “Ethical of you, I suppose.”

“Oh, _thank_ you.”

“Hang on, though, if it wasn’t _appropriate_ for you to approach me while I was working, uh, well, you’re at work now, aren’t you, should I not—I mean, was this a bad—”

“Oh, dear, yes, I do see your point,” Aziraphale said, frowning. He lit up. “Let me just—”

He scurried over to the shop window and flipped the sign to CLOSED.

“There we go,” he said, a trifle breathlessly. “Not at work anymore.”

Crowley grinned. “Right. So. Two private citizens. In that case. Have dinner with me, angel?”

“Oh, _yes.”_

“Brilliant. That’s—it’s great. Terrific. Friday work for you?”

Aziraphale pulled a small, leather-bound book out of his coat pocket and ran a hand down one of the pages. “Yes,” he said, looking up and smiling brightly, “Friday should work perfectly.”

“I’ll come round here, then? Pick you up? How does eight sound?”

“Excellent.”

The shop door jangled. “Aziraphale,” Anathema said, voice full of fond exasperation, “you’ve left the sign on CLOSED again, I keep telling you that if Gabriel sees you’re not open during Core Business Hours—oh. Sorry, Crowley, thought you’d have left.”

“Nope,” Crowley said, waving a hand awkwardly. “Still here.”

“Riiiight,” Anathema said, nodding. “I’ll, um. Go...be somewhere else.”

“No, no,” Aziraphale said. “Crowley was just leaving. You can flip the sign back, you’re quite right, we can’t have Gabriel seeing that. Don’t know what I was thinking, really.”

He actually _winked_ at Crowley.

“I’ll see you Friday, then?” Crowley asked, resisting the urge to wink back on the grounds that Anathema hadn’t precisely signed on for voyeurism.

“Friday.” 

“Aww,” he heard Anathema say as he left. “He forgot the dildo book.”

* * *

Crowley would have said he was walking on clouds the next morning, except that he suspected clouds were likely rather unpleasant to walk on: cold and wet and not at all the sort of thing you ought to be exposing hideously expensive shoes to. Still—the point was, he was _happy,_ walking into work, despite having stayed up entirely too late the night before Googling _best restaurant first date Soho London._ (He had a feeling that his usual method of picking the place with the most pound signs next to it wouldn’t necessarily impress Aziraphale the way he wanted. Aziraphale seemed like he gravitated towards _actual_ quality, not the mere appearance of it.)

“Why’re _you_ in such a good mood?” Hastur asked suspiciously, poking his head in Crowley’s office door.

“What? Oh, I—” _have a date with our most difficult client, and am very much looking forward to possibly getting to stick my tongue in his mouth in the near future—_ “I scored some theatre tickets. Really excellent seats. Looking forward to the play.”

“Gross,” said Hastur.

“How’d the client meeting go yesterday?”

“Fine, obviously,” Hastur said. “Don’t know why you thought it was going to be so _difficult,_ they signed no problem. That’s the problem with you flashy new breed of salesman—”

Crowley forbore from mentioning that no one who’d been doing a job for twenty years could be reasonably described as _new._

“But,” Hastur continued, “I _did_ hear from head office.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, not about that client, whoever called me didn’t even seem to know that they’d asked me to help you out. No, it’s about a different client, one of the newer ones—Azzy Fell and Co?”

“What about ‘em?” Crowley asked, sitting up straight in his chair. 

“You need to cut them loose.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I don’t know why, they didn’t say, just that you need to sever the working relationship.”

“Well, I—I _can’t,”_ Crowley said, “I mean, we just signed a three-year contract with them, the installation was just last month—”

“But you put the out-clause in the contract, didn’t you?”

“Um.”

“Crowley,” Hastur snarled, “the out-clauses were _your idea_ in the first place, it’s your fault we do them at all, you’re the one who insisted that we have a way to back out of every contract at no expense to the company!”

“Yeah,” Crowley said, “but the A.Z. Fell & Co contract doesn’t have one.”

“Why not?”

“Because the client objected to it!”

“So when we actually _need_ your precious little out-clauses, you don’t actually _have_ one?”

“That—sounds about right, yeah.”

“Well, then,” Hastur said, “you’re gonna have to find some _other_ way out of the contract, aren’t you?”

“Like _what?”_

“I thought you were the clever one. Figure it _out.”_

“No,” Crowley said, standing up. “I—no.”

“What do you mean, _no?”_

“I mean I won’t do it,” Crowley said. “I’m not going to waste my time finding some bullshit excuse to drop our contract with a client who hasn’t done anything wrong, just because head office said we have to. Yeah, I _know_ the deal’s not the most lucrative we’ve ever signed, _believe_ me, I know that, my commission’s a pittance, but we _do_ still come out ahead, and it’s _completely_ unfair to Az—to the client for us to jettison him for no good reason!”

“You want me to go back to head office and tell them that you’re denying a direct order because of—what, _principles?”_

“Do _not_ accuse me of having principles,” Crowley snapped. “But my whole reputation is built around contracts, isn’t it, and on sticking to the _exact_ letter of contracts once they’re signed, and I can tell you there’s no honest out in that A.Z. Fell & Co contract, and I’m not about to ruin my good name with _all_ our clients by finding a dishonest one. So. No. I’m not doing it.”

“Fine,” Hastur said, throwing his hands up. “I’ll let head office know you’ve decided to be _uncooperative,_ then.”

“Aww,” Crowley said. “You sound just like my primary-school teacher.”

Hastur growled wordlessly and stalked off.

Crowley sagged back down into his chair.

 _Well,_ he thought gloomily, _that solves the what-to-talk-about-on-the-first-date issue, anyway._


	6. Chapter 6

Friday came both far too quickly and far too slowly for Crowley’s comfort. On one hand, he wanted very much to be on an actual date with Aziraphale, instead of idly daydreaming about it; on the other hand, he was going to have to tell Aziraphale about the fact that he’d been asked to jettison him as a client, and that was _not_ a conversation he was looking forward to having.

Hastur hadn’t raised the issue again, probably largely because Crowley had been doing his level best to avoid him all week. And Crowley dug the signed A.Z. Fell & Co contract out of his filing cabinet and searched to make certain that he’d been right—there wasn’t any out-clause. That had been one of the first things he’d sacrificed, actually, in his skirmish with Aziraphale, on the grounds that he’d sort of known already that he wasn’t going to _want_ to sever the working relationship anytime soon. Hastur had been right; the out-clauses had been Crowley’s idea, something he’d come up with after a client had run into a major PR disaster involving an ill-advised sexually provocative Tweet about Worcestershire sauce and Barathrum had been forced to pay back most of their upfront fees in order to cancel the contract and stop the blowback from spreading to them. He’d drawn up a paragraph, as a result, one that had language vague enough to cover more or less every possible circumstance (and which, of course, ensured that the _client_ couldn’t break things off without great expense on _their_ part). So far, it had never actually been used, and Crowley was obscurely grateful that it wasn’t there to use now.

It wasn’t even losing A.Z. Fell & Co as a client that Crowley objected to. In a way, actually, it would make things simpler. He was going on a proper date with Aziraphale anyway; it wasn’t as though he needed the excuse of stopping by to check on a client in order to talk to him. And although there likely wasn’t an actual conflict of interest in dating a client now that the contract had been finalized, Crowley was fairly certain he’d still have to disclose the relationship to his higher-ups (assuming things went well), if only so they could assign someone else as Aziraphale’s account manager to avoid potential complications. If A.Z. Fell & Co weren’t a Barathrum client at all; well, none of that would be an issue anymore. Crowley didn’t even feel particularly bad about the prospect of taking away the just-installed POS system. He’d be able to set Aziraphale up with a better deal from a higher-quality company, no problem. (Although—who was he kidding, it wasn’t as though Aziraphale needed his help to drive a hard bargain.)

No, Crowley’s issue was with the _why_ of it all. Why, exactly, had head office directed them to let Aziraphale go? _He_ certainly hadn’t been Tweeting anything objectionable. His initial theory—that it had something to do with just how unfavorable towards Barathrum the contract actually was—didn’t, upon further reflection, hold water, because it wasn’t as though Hastur and Ligur hadn’t brokered far less lucrative deals in their time, and none of _those_ were getting cancelled. And A.Z. Fell & Co was a good client for Barathrum, image-wise: small business, pillar of the community, owner had a heartrendingly sunshiny smile that would look fantastic on a client testimonial page. 

Clearly, there was something else afoot, and Crowley was determined to stall Hastur on the issue of cancelling the contract for as long as it took to figure it out.

But he was equally determined to let himself actually enjoy his date with Aziraphale, not have it be entirely overshadowed by worries about work.

So he put it out of his mind, and counted the hours until he could leave to go home and get ready properly.

Which wasn’t an easy proposition in itself, he realized, staring into the cavernous depths of his wardrobe and considering what on earth he ought to wear. He always wore suits to work—Barathrum didn’t have an official dress code, but when Crowley had started out in sales, he’d not had the foggiest idea what he was doing, and leaned on formality of dress in order to project the confidence he didn’t yet feel. Now, twenty-odd years later, he’d simply grown used to it. Besides, he liked having a clear divide between Work Crowley and Regular Crowley, at least aesthetically. It helped suppress any lingering feelings of guilt about ripping people off—he could shed the suit, at the end of the day, like a snakeskin. It wasn’t like _anyone_ had a perfectly morally upright job, anyway. Crowley just refused to fool himself about his. 

But the problem with this neat divide, he thought now, was that it _wasn’t_ actually as neat as all that. Because it wasn’t like it was Work Crowley who was taking Aziraphale out on a date, was it, and yet it had only ever been Work Crowley (at least clothing-wise) that Aziraphale had interacted with before.

He pulled on a pair of jeans and a henley, glanced at the ensemble in the mirror, frowned, and added a scarf. But—well, Aziraphale seemed like...an old-fashioned sort of person, to say the least. Someone who possibly had Ideas about what one ought to wear to dinner. And Crowley doubted whether those Ideas would encompass _denim._

After a moment’s thought, he retrieved the suit trousers he’d worn to work that day, put them back on, and added a dark red dress shirt instead of the plain white one from earlier. He added a tie, felt stupid, took it off, unbuttoned his collar, and finally decided to shove the tie in the glovebox of the car in the event of a last-minute change of heart. 

“Right,” he said, aloud. “That’ll do it.”

He left for Soho with plenty of time for delay (traffic jam, car breakdown, the road suddenly turning into a ring of eternal flame), with the net result that he arrived embarrassingly early (it wasn’t as though it was precisely a _lengthy_ drive) and was forced to do a number of circuits around the neighborhood, trying not to think about the amount he was wasting on petrol.

At ten minutes to eight, he pulled up in front of the bookshop and was deliberating whether or not to go up and ring the bell when Aziraphale came out, looking slightly less rumpled than usual and smiling with what Crowley suspected—hoped?—might be a touch of nervousness.

He jumped out of the car and ran round to hold the passenger door open.

“Oh— _thank_ you,” Aziraphale said, “really, _quite_ unnecessary—”

“Oh, you are a _terrible_ liar,” Crowley said, because while Aziraphale’s _mouth_ might be saying “quite unnecessary,” his eyes were saying something more like “why, yes, I _do_ enjoy being made a fuss over.”

“I thought perhaps you’d forgotten something,” Aziraphale said, once Crowley’d got back in the driver’s seat.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, only that I saw you go by some time ago, but then you didn’t stop. And then—I believe it was four more times?”

“Hrmph,” Crowley said. “You, erm, you noticed that, did you?”

“You _do_ have a rather distinctive car,” Aziraphale pointed out. “It would be rather difficult _not_ to notice.”

Crowley grumbled wordlessly. Apparently there _hadn’t_ been any point in doing the circuits, then, not if Aziraphale knew exactly how early he’d arrived, anyway— “Hang on,” he said, a thought striking him. “How’d you see me go by four times, anyway?”

Aziraphale had the grace to blush. It was unfortunately attractive. “I—may have been glancing out the window. From time to time.”

Crowley grinned. “Right. _Definitely_ not gazing out at the street all aflutter with anticipation for me to arrive?”

“I wouldn’t say _aflutter,_ no,” Aziraphale said. “At any rate. We _are_ going to dinner, are we not? I do hope you’ve selected somewhere good.”

“Yeah, about that,” Crowley said, maneuvering into the street, “I thought, well, don’t know much about your taste in food, yet, do I, so I thought I’d give you a choice. There’s this little hole-in-the-wall Thai place that’s got _great_ reviews, or we can go full traditional white-tablecloths-and-wine. Up to you.”

“Oh. Well. As it happens, I _did_ just have Thai yesterday.”

“Say no more,” Crowley said, and turned the corner to head to the hideously expensive French restaurant where he’d managed to get a reservation by deploying the name of one of his clients and dropping some loaded hints about a series of upcoming business lunches. 

“Do you know, I’ve never been here before,” Aziraphale said, glancing around as they were led to their table. “I’ve always wanted to go, but, well—one feels silly, going to a place like this alone.”

“Why? Not like anyone’s going to be judging you, is it?” 

“I suppose not,” Aziraphale said, carefully unfolding his napkin, “but I still get the sense it’s a waste, somehow.”

“Not a waste if you enjoy it.”

“No. But this is better.”

He smiled at Crowley, whose heart found a new and pleasantly painful way to flip over.

“Oh, how flattering,” he said, “glad to know I’m better company than _absolutely no one—”_

“I understand you’re joking, but that _is_ a compliment, you know,” Aziraphale said mildly. “There aren’t actually very many people whose companionship I’d choose over solitude.”

Crowley was saved having to answer this bit of devastating honesty by their waiter’s timely arrival.

“So,” Aziraphale said, after they’d ordered (chef’s choice four-course dinner with accompanying wine pairing), “how was the rest of your week? I trust you didn’t scandalize any more booksellers with your...singular choice in literature.”

“Hah. No,” Crowley said, “not like anyone else is offering beeswax dildo books anyway—um, not that I checked, or anything. Obviously.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Actually, though, as much as I want to talk to you about—well, literally anything besides dildos or POS systems—I think there’s something I should tell you about, first off.”

“Yes?”

Crowley took a deep breath. “I’ve been directed to let you go. As a client. To—cancel the contract.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale said, eyebrows shooting up. “Because of—” he gestured between them.

“No,” Crowley said quickly, “no, no, they don’t—they haven’t got any idea we’re seeing each other. Socially. Like I’d tell Hastur the first thing about my love life—anyway, point is, it’s not that. Can’t be.”

“Then what _is_ it?”

“I don’t know,” Crowley admitted. “They wouldn’t tell me why. Apparently just—orders from above. Or, well, given the sort of people who work at head office, might be better to say orders from _below._ I said no, of course,” he added. “Lucked out a bit, actually, since you objected to my usual out-clause in the contract. Couldn’t just jettison you, not without the company taking a financial hit. But, thing is, even if they haven’t got an easy way to get rid of you, I can’t help thinking there’s got to be something going on. Some reason they don’t want you as a client.”

“And you don’t know what that is,” Aziraphale said, voice tightly controlled. 

“Afraid not.”

“So you’ve told them no,” Aziraphale said, slowly, “you’ve said—what, that there’s no way out of the contract? Or that you won’t try to find one?”

“Both, actually. But I don’t know...I mean, if they want it broken badly enough, they’ll get someone else on it.”

“Or they could refuse your refusal. Tell you that if you don’t let me go, your job is forfeit—”

Crowley shook his head. “They wouldn’t do that. Be stupid of ‘em, I’m their best salesman, screwing me over for a nobody client—I mean, from a financial perspective, not—anyway, it wouldn’t make any sense.”

“Perhaps not,” Aziraphale said, sounding unconvinced.

The waiter came by with their first course and a bottle of wine, offering the glass for Aziraphale to taste. He took a sip, eyes not leaving Crowley, and nodded. “Yes, that’s fine, thank you.”

“You barely tasted that,” Crowley said, once the waiter had gone.

“Is it not all right?’

“It’s _fine,”_ said Crowley, who hadn’t bothered trying it himself yet, “but you don’t—are you not enjoying yourself?”

“Not really, no,” Aziraphale said, “given that you’ve just told me that I’m apparently some sort of _liability_ to your company. You’ll have to forgive my being somewhat preoccupied.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“Then why did you _tell_ me?”

“In case it isn’t nothing. I just—I thought you should know. If something’s going on. Be forewarned. If there’s any...skeletons in your closet, anything you think could be the reason—I know you said you didn’t inherit the shop, if the way you got the money was anything other than aboveboard—”

“Are you accusing me of being a _criminal?”_

“No!” Crowley felt as though he were scrabbling at the edge of some conversational precipice. “No, God, I don’t—I’m sorry, it’s only that I _can’t_ see anything wrong with you—at _all—_ and I don’t have any idea what I’m missing.”

Aziraphale raised a condescending spoonful of bisque to his mouth. “I assure you,” he said, sipping it—Crowley watched the bob of his throat as he swallowed—“the funding for my establishment was obtained through _entirely_ legal means.”

“Okay,” Crowley said. “Okay. I’m sorry. You don’t have to...tell me, or anything, if you think of something. Just—think about it.”

Aziraphale nodded, and they were silent for a few moments. Crowley, for lack of anything else to do, ate some of his soup. It tasted like spoon.

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale said, after a moment, putting his spoon down. “I oughtn’t to have snapped at you—”

“I shouldn’t’ve implied you were a thief, _I’m_ sorry—”

“Oh, no,” Aziraphale said, smiling a bit, the first time he’d smiled since Crowley had brought up the contract. “Coming from you? I’ll choose to interpret any accusations of unscrupulous conduct as a compliment. And,” he continued, face growing serious, “I _am_ glad that you told me. And grateful to you, as well. I confess I haven’t any idea why your company might object to me as a client, but I shall make certain that I go over that contract again and ensure it’s entirely airtight. Prepare for an assault.”

“Good,” Crowley said, relieved. “That’s all I wanted. To make sure you were ready.”

“But,” Aziraphale said, “I must say that it seems, given this new intelligence, that the nature of our professional connection has changed. Or will change. It seems that your employer and I are now...adversaries.”

Crowley fiddled with his napkin. “You could say that.”

“And, so, unfortunately—” Aziraphale’s voice was brittle, and Crowley could see his knuckles growing white where he gripped the soup spoon— “I don’t think it’s wise for us to, erm. See each other socially, as you put it.”

“What? No,” Crowley said quickly. “That’s—no, I mean—”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, not looking at him, “it would appear that there is some sort of conflict at hand, and you and I—we’re on opposite sides.”

“That is _ridiculous,_ it’s not a damn _war,_ it’s a bit of—fiddling with contracts, that’s all—”

“What would your employers say, if they knew about this?” Aziraphale asked. “You _say_ you don’t think it’s anything serious, but you don’t know that. You can’t. It could cause professional difficulties for you, if we’re known to be— _fraternizing—_ it could cause difficulties for me, if that contract is tested and there’s found to be any implication you could have edited out that clause for personal reasons. It’s simply too dangerous. I’m sorry.”

“If you don’t want to go out with me, you can just say so,” Crowley snapped, “d’you think I don’t know how to take no for an answer—”

“It’s got nothing to do with what I want!” Aziraphale said, loudly enough that a woman at the next table looked over at them. “It’s merely what’s prudent. And, it’s not as though—I mean, we scarcely know each other, really, surely it’s better to end things as they are now than to get...entangled further.”

Crowley looked at him for a moment. “You’re really worried? That it could hurt you?”

“I can’t lose everything I’ve worked for,” Aziraphale said, more quietly. “Not even for—I can’t. I’m sorry. It’s too risky.” 

Crowley fumbled a bit for words, couldn’t find anything that didn’t sound either pathetic or resentful, and settled for a resigned nod.

“Thank you. I’m glad you can—see sense.” 

They were quiet, for a moment. Aziraphale took a sip of wine.

“So—what, then,” Crowley asked, sagging back in his chair, “are you calling the whole thing off? Are you just going to leave now, goodbye, see you never, thanks for one-quarter of dinner?”

“Well,” Aziraphale said, as though Crowley had said something very clever indeed (which he hadn’t. He was fairly certain that he hadn’t). “I suppose that, as we’re already _here,_ there’s no reason not to stay for the whole meal. There’s hardly anything improper in _that.”_

“No,” Crowley said, relieved. “Nothing improper. Stay. Please. If you’d like.”

“I will, then,” Aziraphale said, and Crowley caught the faintest hint of a smile playing across his lips as he took another sip of wine. 

“So,” he said, diving back into his soup, “when you picked up all those _modern_ books to spite Gabriel, what was the most outrageous title you found, and _did_ you put it in the window?”

“Oh, dear,” Aziraphale said. “Yes. Well, there were a number of _very_ strong contenders, but I think perhaps _The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Erotic Macaroni Portraiture..._ ”

Crowley learned, over the course of dinner, that Aziraphale had very particular opinions about footnotes versus endnotes, the correct way to iron trousers, the best knot for a bowtie (and the concession that yes, clip-on ties _did_ have their place, even if _he_ wouldn’t wear one), marmite, precisely what constituted a fruit versus a vegetable in the culinary sense, and the fine delineation between the amount of clutter that qualified as “cosy” or “complete disorder.”

Crowley, himself, hadn’t spent much time thinking about most of these topics previously, but he found himself sucked in by Aziraphale’s clear enthusiasm—sometimes to agree, sometimes to vociferously disagree. Caring—not just about things, but about the people around them, too—was apparently infectious. As was smiling—by the time the waiter came round with the bill, Crowley’s cheeks hurt from grinning.

“So,” Aziraphale said, once Crowley had paid and the waiter had gone, “I suppose—this is it, then.”

“You’re sure?” Crowley asked, this time not bothering to worry if he sounded pathetic. “Not trying to pressure you, I’m sorry, I just—look, I had fun tonight. A lot of fun.”

“I did, too,” Aziraphale said, fiddling with the tablecloth. “It’s not that I don’t _like_ you, Crowley. But I think it’s best if this doesn’t happen again. Perhaps someday, if things...settle down, we could...well, anyway, I’ve very much enjoyed spending time with you, and I’m sorry it has to end, but it does.”

Crowley, who’d never been one to push a client on a sale that clearly wasn’t going to happen, nodded and stood up. “Come on, then,” he said. “I’ll give you a lift home.”

Aziraphale stood, too, but with visible reluctance.

And—well, Crowley might not strong-arm people into things, either professionally or personally, but he could see when someone was open to being persuaded.

“Unless,” he said, carefully, “you’d rather...there’s a pub a few minutes away, if you wanted to—get a drink, keep the night going for a bit, before…”

Aziraphale lit up. “Oh, _yes,”_ he said, “that sounds _delightful,_ what a tip-top idea.”

* * *

Aziraphale waved a hand in Crowley’s face. “It’s not about the _penguinsh,”_ he said, hiccuping. “It’s about the whatsit. The _principle.”_

Crowley looked up from what was either his third or fourth drink. “They’ve got the little flappy feet, penguins have,” he said, moving his palms up and down to illustrate. “Woddery’callem. Flippers.”

Aziraphale nodded gravely. “Webby,” he said.

“Webby,” Crowley agreed. “An’ they just—waddle around, don’t they, great big eggs on their feet, holdin’ em. Keepin’ em warm.”

“It’sh a beautiful thing,” Aziraphale said. The solemnity of this statement was somewhat marred by his losing his balance on the stool and toppling forward into Crowley.

“Steady, there,” Crowley said, placing a hand on Aziraphale’s shoulder to help him back into place. “Can’t have you spillin’ on me.”

Aziraphale waved his glass hazardously and giggled. “Oh, but if you got all wet again, that’d be _lovely,”_ he said, leaning in. “I did _so_ enjoy it the first time.”

“Ha!” Crowley crowed, “knew I wasn’t th’only one flustered—”

“Definitely not,” Aziraphale said, eyes dropping to Crowley’s shirt. His tongue darted out above his bottom lip, and then back in as he bit down gently.

Crowley watched intently. “Do penguins have ‘em?”

“Have what?” 

“Tongues. Have birds got tongues? Can’t remember.”

Aziraphale shook his head. “No, surely not, you don’t have a tongue _and_ a beak.”

“Why not?”

“Simply isn’t _done,_ dear fellow. 'S not the _thing.”_

Crowley frowned. “How d’they taste things, then? Without the little—” he stuck out his own tongue and drummed his fingers on it— “the buds. Tastebuds. Need ‘em.”

“Perhaps,” allowed Aziraphale, with the grandiosity of the very inebriated. 

_“Can’t_ have the penguins not tastin’ things. I mean, you’ve got this bird, beautiful bird, _gay_ bird, can’t even fly, you’re gonna tell him he can’t taste the...the…”

“Fishies,” Aziraphale supplied. “Eat the little fishies. Straight down the gullet.”

“You’re gonna tell the penguin he doesn’t even get to _taste_ the fish?”

Aziraphale looked taken aback for a moment, but then shook his head. “Tisn’t _me_ telling them that. It’s _Nature._ Can’t argue with Nature.”

“Well—” began Crowley, and then thought better of it. “Anyway. You had a...thingie. A point.”

“Did I?” 

“Can’t very well expect _me_ to know if you did, can you?”

“No,” said Aziraphale, laughing a bit. “Expect not.”

There was a pause, and Crowley realized, as though through a layer of pebbled glass, that the pub had quieted considerably.

“I think perhaps I had better go home,” Aziraphale said, clearly making an effort to speak normally.

“I’d offer to drive you,” Crowley said, “but—”

Aziraphale snorted. “Quite.” He slid off his stool and headed for the coatrack at the pub’s entrance (Crowley had been coming to this pub for years and had always vaguely assumed that the coatrack was populated solely by outerwear that had been abandoned by forgetful patrons from long ago. Trust Aziraphale to prove him wrong by actually _using_ it).

Crowley followed him. “I could _walk_ you home, though,” he said. 

Aziraphale turned, one arm in his coat and the other out of it. Crowley fought the instinct to help him into it. He was fairly certain that wasn’t the done thing, even if the protocol for “first date that had turned into a final date” was unclear.

“No,” Aziraphale said, shrugging his other arm into his coat. “Fair’s fair. _You_ drove us here, _you_ paid for dinner, ergo, _I_ get to walk _you_ home.”

“Bold offer, isn’it,” Crowley said, “don’t even know where I live—”

Aziraphale blinked. “Well,” he said, swaying a bit on his feet, “I may have done just an _itsy-bitsy_ bit of _research—”_

“HA!” Crowley said, loudly enough that their few fellow remaining patrons turned to look at him. “You _Googled_ me.”

“‘S merely a matter of _safety,”_ Aziraphale said, “look someone up beforehand. Common sense.”

“All right then,” Crowley said, pushing open the door to the pub and gesturing with his hand for Aziraphale to go out ahead of him. “Walk me home.”

“My ver’ great pleasure,” said Aziraphale, sweeping out with wobbly dignity.

The chill of the night air hit Crowley bracingly as he stepped outside, dissipating some of the fuzziness from the alcohol. He glanced over at Aziraphale to see that he, too, seemed more sober, his gait scarcely unsteady at all.

“May I tell you something?”

Aziraphale’s face was solemn, serious, and Crowley nodded apprehensively, wondering what he might, perhaps, be about to—

Aziraphale leaned in towards him, their shoulders bumping, and, breath warm against Crowley’s ear, said: “I found the bowl where they keep the mints.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of round, white mints, the kind they’d been given after dinner.

“You _stole_ them?” Crowley asked, burying his faint sense of disappointment under the giddy delight of before. “You’re an absolute _menace,_ angel, really—”

Aziraphale pouted. “If you’re going to malign me, I shan’t offer you any, then.” He withdrew his hand, slipping the mints back into his pocket.

“Oh, come _on,”_ said Crowley, who didn’t really care about the mints at all. “‘S a compliment, obviously. How’d you get ‘em, anyway? Find some loophole, insist that your status as a restaurant patron made the mints your property?” 

“As a matter of fact,” Aziraphale said, puffing up a bit, “I happen to be rather good at sleight of hand. Took them right out from under a waiter's nose. He didn't suspect a thing.”

“Are you sure it wasn't just because he didn't think it was worth calling out a paying customer for stealing mints?”

“Nonsense,” said Aziraphale robustly. “All down to skill.”

Crowley was going to argue further, but they rounded the corner and there was his block of flats. “This is me.”

Aziraphale's smile dimmed. "Oh. Ah. Good-night, then?"

“Hang on," Crowley said, “you volunteered to escort me home, didn't you, I'd think that means you have to walk me _all_ the way.”

“You do have a point," said Aziraphale, giggling a bit. " _Such_ horrors as could befall you on the stairwell—”

“Imagine the stain on your conscience if I got murdered in the lift.”

“Couldn't live with myself,” said Aziraphale, and followed him into the building.

They got in the lift. Crowley pushed the button for the top floor, and the doors closed. 

Crowley turned to look at Aziraphale. The fuzz of hilarity that had been dissipating over the course of their walk was now gone completely. Aziraphale wasn't smiling any longer; his jaw was set. He saw Crowley looking at him, and his face softened, his mouth falling slightly open, the tip of his tongue just visible. 

Crowley, not bothering to consider whether it was a good idea, took one long stride forward to close the gap between them, and kissed him.

For a split second, he wondered if he’d been wrong—but then Aziraphale surged into him, kissing him back, hands flying to Crowley’s neck to pull him in further.

Crowley, in clumsy and enthusiastic relief, tried to roll his hips into Aziraphale’s, misjudged, and ended up shoving him against the panel of buttons.

Aziraphale jerked away.

Crowley stepped back. “Sorry—”

“Don’t _apologise_ ,” Aziraphale said, with an imperiousness that was quickly belied by the shakiness of his breath. “I only wanted—” 

He stepped away from the lift buttons, which had all lit up. 

“Oh. Whoops,” said Crowley, as the lift came to a halt at the second floor, the doors opening up. 

“Oh dear,” said Aziraphale, carefully, “it seems this might be rather a long ride—”

Crowley leaned back against a non-button wall. “Any ideas?”

This time, Aziraphale was the one to step forward and kiss him.

It was slower, now, less frantic—they were stopping at every floor, after all—and Crowley ran a hand along Aziraphale’s stomach, playing a little with the hem of his waistcoat, pulling him in closer so their bodies were flush together.

Aziraphale broke the kiss, after a moment, ignoring the soft whine of protest from Crowley and instead setting to work on his jawline, his neck, the space just beneath his ear. Crowley let his own hand drift lower, palm pressing into the back of Aziraphale’s trousers. He was faintly aware of the lift starting and stopping as it opened the doors at each floor, but his consciousness had mostly narrowed to the weight of Aziraphale’s body against his, the curls of his hair tickling Crowley’s nose as he bent to kiss his collarbone, the taste of his mouth as Crowley tilted Aziraphale’s face up to kiss his mouth again.

The lift stopped again, and the doors slid open, and a shrill voice said, “About _time,_ isn’t it, I called the lift _ages_ ago!”

A woman swept onto the lift, all dour indignation and overpriced handbag.

Aziraphale turned away from Crowley, and, as though he hadn’t _just_ been doing something impressively filthy with his tongue, said, “I am _so_ sorry, dear lady, we had a _dreadful_ mishap with the buttons and I simply _couldn’t_ figure out how to fix it. I _do_ hope you haven’t been too terribly inconvenienced.”

“Hmph,” said the woman, mollified.

Aziraphale twinkled. “Thank you _ever_ so much for understanding,” he said, and swept out of the lift, Crowley following behind him and studiously avoiding eye contact with the woman.

“D’you know,” Crowley said, crowding him back against the hallway wall the second the doors had closed again, “sometimes I can’t make up my mind whether you’re a wolf in sheep’s clothing or just a _very_ clever sheep.”

“Well,” Aziraphale said, “I _do_ hope you don’t do _that_ with any member of the animal kingdom other than _homo sapiens.”_

Crowley kissed him again, pressing him into the wall. “Sounds like something out of one of your books.”

“Oh no,” said Aziraphale, gasping a bit, “those generally have the hero turn back into human form before the sex—oh. Oh, you meant the, the joke books.”

“I did,” Crowley said, “but I also _definitely_ want to hear more about whatever books _you_ were talking about—”

“Do you actually live here, or are we just going to stay in the hallway all night?” Aziraphale asked, which, as changes of subject went, was both blatantly obvious and impressively effective.

“Right,” said Crowley, and led them the few steps to his door. “Hang on,” he told Aziraphale, who was crowding up against him again in a distractingly wiggly fashion. 

He fumbled in his pockets for his phone, opened the app that operated his Smart Lock, and tapped the button to unlock the door.

Nothing happened.

“What’s wrong?” Aziraphale asked, peering over Crowley’s shoulder. “Why on _earth_ do you have _that?”_

“It’s a Smart Lock,” Crowley said, stabbing fruitlessly at the phone screen. “So I don’t have to remember a key.”

“Well, it doesn’t seem to be _working,”_ Aziraphale pointed out, unnecessarily.

“Yeah. Thanks. Noticed,” Crowley said. 

Aziraphale drew back slightly. 

Crowley checked the settings on his phone quickly—connected to Wi-Fi, lock had plenty of battery, no obvious problems.

“Sorry,” he said, force-quitting and re-opening the app. “This never happens.”

“It’s all right,” Aziraphale said, his voice less breathy, more precise, than it had been before. 

Crowley glanced up from his phone and over at him. “What?”

“This isn’t—wise,” Aziraphale said, stiffly.

“It wasn’t any less unwise five minutes ago,” Crowley said, heart sinking, “but you seemed on board with it then—”

“Yes, well, I may have had a moment of weakness, but thanks to your little gadget there, my head’s cleared a bit, and I’m afraid—I can’t.”

“You _can,”_ Crowley said, poking the phone screen again, more out of habit than anything, “really, we’d hardly got _started,_ I promise—”

Aziraphale flushed slightly, but shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

The door lock clicked open.

“Good,” Aziraphale said, “I’m glad you got in safely.”

“You can come in. Not like that, I mean—just for—a cup of tea, or—”

“It’s the _or_ I’m afraid of,” Aziraphale said. “And it’s already bad enough...it’s for the best. Really.”

Crowley thunked the back of his head against his door. “Right. Well. Goodnight, then.”

“Goodnight,” said Aziraphale, and began to walk away. 

He stopped after a moment, and turned back.

“Crowley?”

“Yes?”

“Those things are a dreadful security vulnerability. You oughtn’t to use them,” said Aziraphale, and disappeared down the hallway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the pitfalls of the Internet of Things are something that can actually be so personal...
> 
> PLEASE google penguin tongues, they are WILD.
> 
> Also thank you so much to everyone who's been commenting, I'm really bad about responding but I absolutely read and appreciate all of them!


	7. Chapter 7

Crowley wasn’t, he realized sometime over the course of the weekend following The World’s Best/Worst First/Last Date, actually upset with Aziraphale. He’d thought he was, at first, in those initial moments after the door to his flat had closed with him alone in it, the memory of Aziraphale’s body against his, the alcohol-and-peppermint taste of his mouth, altogether too vivid. He’d gone into his bedroom and punched a pillow until his arms went sore (which was embarrassingly quickly, given that Crowley didn’t have much in the way of upper body strength). Then, because he’d been left frustrated in more ways than one after their brief encounter in the lift, he’d found another, significantly more pleasant, use for the pillow (and made his arms still sorer in the process). 

Afterwards, sticky and depressed, he’d tried to summon up the energy from earlier, to be properly _angry_ with Aziraphale for his technology-mishap-induced change of heart, for oscillating so wildly back and forth between _no we mustn’t_ and _yes please do._ But Crowley found that he couldn’t quite make it happen—that even though he was still undoubtedly upset, his vexation wasn’t directed at Aziraphale—who, after all, had been completely within his rights to leave when he did—but at the concatenation of circumstances that had precipitated his actions. 

Because it was very difficult to _blame_ Aziraphale, for not wanting to risk his entire livelihood on a relationship with someone he barely knew. Crowley thought about the bookshop, about how he’d scarcely ever seen another customer in there, about Gabriel’s ridiculous Small Business Association strictures, about Aziraphale’s clear anxiety, and wondered, for the first time, whether Aziraphale’s bargaining over the contract had been spurred primarily by an actual need to save money, not just intellectual one-upmanship. It was entirely possible that Aziraphale literally couldn’t afford for his deal with Barathrum to go south.

So, no, Crowley wasn’t angry with Aziraphale, who, after all, if Crowley’s powers of observation were anything near as good as he thought, had likely had a _most_ uncomfortable walk home (no pillow being immediately available to _him)._ He _was,_ however, angry with Barathrum, and Hastur, and whoever’d decided that A.Z. Fell & Co wasn’t worth keeping as a client, and that anger was a great deal easier to channel into something productive. Crowley holed up in his flat, and plotted, and waited for Monday.

“I’ve changed my mind,” he announced, walking unceremoniously into Hastur’s office.

“Sorry?”

“About that client. A.Z. Fell & Co. I’ll find an out in the contract. Well—I’ll try.”

Hastur cocked his head suspiciously. “Really? You seemed pretty against it last week.”

Crowley nodded. “Yeah, well, I thought it over, didn’t I, and I’ve decided to be a team player on this one. You really made some good points. Forced me to reconsider.”

He worried for a moment that he’d laid it on too thick, but Hastur broke into an unpleasantly tooth-forward smile. “Crowley! Glad I could make you see sense.”

“Thing is, though,” Crowley said, carefully, “I really do think that contract’s airtight. Our best option is getting Az—the store to sign off voluntarily. So I’m going to have to be spending a lot more time out of the office, next few weeks. Have to head over, check out their setup, see if I can turn flaws into dealbreakers.”

Hastur frowned. “All right,” he said, “as long as you’re not expecting anyone else to pick up your slack back here. That meeting cover the other day was a one-time thing. Not interested in babysitting your other clients.”

“Oh, no,” Crowley said, “not at all, totally able to keep up with the rest of ‘em, don’t even give it a second thought.”

“Then fine.”

“Great. Terrific. I’ll just—be off, then?”

Hastur grunted, and Crowley fled.

So that was step one sorted. Unfortunately, the _other_ person he needed to convince in order for this plan to work was a good deal more intelligent than Hastur. 

And, as he had come to expect, was _not_ behind the till at the bookshop.

“Does your boss actually work,” Crowley asked Anathema, who appeared to be performing some sort of tarot card reading on the shop counter, “or does he just hide away in the back room and leave you to deal with all the customers?”

Anathema smiled vaguely. “Oh no,” she said, flipping over a card. “He works. It’s just, well, of course _you_ won’t have seen the way he gets with actual shoppers, but I promise it’s better for everyone that I do the bulk of the sales.”

“Fair enough,” Crowley said. He glanced around. “Is he, er, working now, or—”

“In the back,” Anathema said, finally looking up from her cards. “I’ll get him. But—” she smiled in a not-at-all-reassuring way— “first, I have some _personalized_ book recommendations for you, because the beeswax dildo book didn’t work out. So. Can I interest you in _Zero to Rim Job in Four Days: How To Love Your Decaying Mortal Body,_ or maybe—”

“Anathema, do we have any more of the—” Aziraphale came out of the back room, holding a leather-bound volume in his hand and wearing a slightly puzzled expression which changed to something warier as he caught sight of Crowley. “What are you doing here?”

It wasn’t—quite—an accusation, so at least there was that.

“I’m here,” Crowley said, carefully, “as a representative of Barathrum Systems.”

“Oh?”

“It’s been decided that, as part of—client cultivation—that I should spend more time checking up on things. Seeing how our system’s working out for you. Making completely certain that you’re _entirely_ satisfied. That you don’t want to call off the contract for any reason.”

Aziraphale’s expression cleared slightly. “I think perhaps I understand.”

“It’s just,” Crowley said, abruptly abandoning whatever sort of cool spy-style doubletalk he’d been attempting to engage in, because after all the most important thing was that Aziraphale _did_ understand, “it’s that neither of us really knows what’s going on, do we? And I figure—better to tell ‘em I’m working on getting you out of the contract, instead of them sending someone else, who might actually _try._ Seems like the best way to try and get to the bottom of this.”

Aziraphale nodded. “It’s very kind of you,” he said, softly. “To spend your time investigating this. I’m sure you have—other clients, other things—”

“Hah. Well. No. Not really very kind,” Crowley said, “because, you know, like I said, going to have to spend _so_ much time here. Hangin’ around. Talkin’ to you.”

“Well, when you put it like that...I don’t see how one could _possibly_ object, really.”

“Hoped you’d say that.”

“It is—as you said—it has to be—strictly professional, though, you understand. I don’t wish to—I haven’t any desire to mislead you, if your intentions—”

“It’s fine,” Crowley said, cutting him off. “I get it. Completely. I’m not trying to change your mind about….anything else. Promise. It’s just a, a—”

“An arrangement,” Aziraphale said, voice more confident now. “Simply a mutually beneficial arrangement.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.”

Anathema loudly cleared her throat. 

Crowley, who’d completely forgotten she was there, because apparently every time he looked at Aziraphale his vision entered Portrait Mode, nearly jumped. 

“Anathema,” Aziraphale said, sounding only slightly less surprised than Crowley felt. “I hope I don’t need to tell you to be discreet…”

“Mmm,” said Anathema, “yeah, of course, but actually I was more wondering if Crowley could move out of the way, where he’s standing now he’s _completely_ messing up the energy of the room and it’s getting in the way of my reading.”

“Oh. Uh. Sure,” Crowley said, suddenly feeling as though he’d grown about six extra limbs. “Where—”

Anathema sketched a circle with her hand. “Literally anywhere _outside_ that radius, please.”

Crowley stepped outside of the offending circle, towards Aziraphale. “D’you just let her order everyone around like that? Who’s the boss here, anyhow?”

“Well, it’s certainly not _you,”_ Aziraphale said dryly.

“Mmm,” said Anathema, eyes fixed on her cards. “I’ve heard your company is the enemy now, so. Expect to be treated accordingly.”

“Hey,” Crowley said, “wait, did you not _just_ hear the whole bit where I’m doing a very cool double-agent thing to try and help the shop?”

“I didn’t.”

“Well, I _am,_ so. No need to freeze me out.”

“Okay,” Anathema said, mildly. “I _won’t_ stop giving you book recommendations, then. If you’re on our side after all.”

“Hang on—”

Crowley was interrupted by the jingle of the bell on the shop’s door.

“Hey there, everyone,” Gabriel said, smiling as though he’d just been hired as an orthodonture spokesmodel. “Just coming by to check on my favourite bookshop! How’s it going, Aziraphale? Sales all right?”

“Sales are fine, thank you,” Aziraphale said coldly. “And I must say I don’t particularly need a _check-in,_ Gabriel, these unannounced visits are becoming something of an annoyance.”

Gabriel’s smile retracted slightly, so that Crowley could only see the edges of his gums, instead of the entirety. “Now, Aziraphale, I’m certain I don’t need to remind _you_ that the Small Business Association bylaws state that our representatives have the right to conduct inspections at their discretion to make certain that all businesses are performing up to standard, do I, now?”

“Am I _not_ performing up to standard, then?” Aziraphale asked sharply. “I’ve obeyed every single one of your dictates to the _letter,_ I think you’ll find. Unless you have some objection—”

“No, no,” Gabriel said quickly. “No, all seems completely fine.”

“That’s splendid,” Aziraphale said. “In that case, I really _wouldn’t_ want to detain you—”

“Not at all—”

“And I _certainly_ wouldn’t want for any _customers_ to be put off if you were to linger.”

Gabriel blinked. “Uh, not sure how I would put people off—”

“I’m very put off,” Crowley jumped in. “Yeah. Uh. Was totally about to buy this book that Aziraphale’s _very_ friendly and approachable and definitely not-at-all-terrifying clerk suggested for me, _completely_ aligned with my interests, but this little scene has really made me think twice.”

Gabriel squinted at him. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

“Don’t think so,” Crowley lied brightly. 

“Hmm. Are you sure? I really feel like I know you—”

“Gabriel!” Aziraphale snapped. “The _customer_ just _told_ you that you’re causing him to reconsider a purchase, do you mind _leaving_ so that I can attempt to salvage this sale?”

“Uh—”

“Or I _shall_ have to lodge a complaint with the appropriate authorities.”

“Right. Um. Glad everything’s going well, then, don’t see any reason for me to stick around,” Gabriel said, clapping his hands together. “Catch you later!”

“Thank you,” Aziraphale said, once he’d gone. 

“Course,” Crowley said. “Really can’t believe he bought that—”

“Mmm. I’m afraid I can’t entirely believe he _did_ buy it.”

“He left.”

“Yes, and please _don’t_ think I’m criticizing you in any way, but although Gabriel can seem rather—thick-headed, I don’t think he’s _entirely_ witless. In my view, it’s more likely he simply decided it wasn’t worth the bother to determine the reality of the situation.”

“Hm,” Crowley said. “Does it matter?”

“Only in the sense that I don’t know whether he’s up to anything _else._ But, I suppose it’s not as though I haven’t got enough to worry about, at present.”

 _“Don’t_ worry about it,” Crowley said firmly. “As long as I’m your representative at Barathrum, I’ll make sure that contract holds up, and I _have_ to imagine that they won’t be able to do whatever it is they’re planning unless it breaks.”

“Yes. You’re probably right,” Aziraphale said, not looking entirely at ease.

“I’m on your side, angel. I promise.”

“Hey,” Anathema said, “so, does that mean you _are_ going to buy _Zero to Rim Job in Four Days,_ or…”

“Does it actually _exist?”_

Anathema smiled in a way that filled Crowley with distinct unease. “Oh yeah. It _definitely_ does.”

* * *

“How many customers would you say you get, on an average day?” Crowley asked. They were alone in the shop, for the moment, since it was Anathema’s day off and no one had come in to browse since Crowley had arrived half an hour ago. He’d taken up residence on the sofa, while Aziraphale seemed determined to cling to the plausible deniability of the till. 

“I’m not certain,” Aziraphale said. “Why do you ask?”

Crowley shrugged. “Just curious, I guess. Or—wondering whether you’re a threat to someone else, in the area. Some other rare bookseller.”

“I doubt it,” Aziraphale said. “There aren’t very many customers who come in off the street—as you’ve seen—and when it comes to the _actual_ antiquarian and unusual books, the real bloodbaths tend to be the auctions. It’s not as though we’re undercutting each other on mass-market paperbacks.”

“Makes sense,” Crowley said. “So there isn’t—anyone who’d want you out of the way, then? Someone you outwitted at an auction, or, I don’t know, sold a forgery to?”

“I’m afraid you’re endowing me with a ruthlessness I don’t possess.”

Crowley snorted. “Please. I went head-to-head with you over a contract and would’ve been half ready to kill you if I hadn’t—” _if I hadn’t wanted to kiss you instead._ “Uh. Point is, don’t go playing innocent with _me.”_

“I shouldn’t dream of it,” Aziraphale said dryly. “But, at any rate, I’m not certain what you’re aiming at here. It’s not as though any rival of mine would be in a position to influence your company into dropping me as a client.”

“Yeah. I was thinking—I don’t know. Some higher-up’s kid, maybe. Wanting to stamp out the competition.”

“I suppose it’s possible.”

“I can do some research. See whether I can turn up any connections.”

“I must say, though, if someone wanted to run me out of business, I can think of a dozen easier ways to do it than some elaborate scheme involving my point-of-sale systems contract.”

“I may be overthinking it,” Crowley admitted. “But—look, the contract being cancelled won’t _actually_ run you out of business, will it? I mean, not that it _will_ be cancelled, because we are _definitely_ going to figure this out, but if it were—that wouldn’t be curtains all on its own, right?”

Aziraphale sighed. “No, I expect it wouldn’t. I’d be out the installation fees and so on, of course, but I do think I’d be able to cover another system, if necessary.”

“Good,” Crowley said. “I just—not to pry, but this place can’t exactly have a healthy profit margin, can it? I know you’ve said you get big sales sometimes, but…”

“No, you’re quite right. It’s all rather precarious. Particularly with all these changes the Small Business Association’s been having me make. If I hadn’t driven such a hard bargain with you, I was seriously considering scaling Anathema’s hours back, or letting her go entirely. Although I don’t know that I could handle sole proprietorship again. I did that back when the shop first opened, but I’m not so young as I was then.”

“Well, we can’t have Anathema losing her job,” Crowley said firmly. “Glad I went easy on you with the contract, then.”

“Oh, _please,”_ Aziraphale said, “you did _not_ go easy on me.”

“I _did—”_

“You did _not,_ you tried every wily trick you could think of to try and do me out of my hard-earned money, and I thwarted every single one of them.”

“Hrmph,” Crowley said, because it was true. “Well. You had an unfair advantage.”

“And _what,_ pray tell, was that?”

“I—” Crowley stopped himself. This was getting dangerously close to flirtation (oh, all right, it had been over the border into Flirtation Land for a good while and was presently laying siege to the city of Honest Declarations of Feelings), and Aziraphale had been very clear on the terms of their interaction. Simply business. And although Crowley gave himself at least sporting odds of coaxing Aziraphale into more of—whatever this was, or even of provoking a repeat performance of their elevator encounter, he didn’t want to push. It wasn’t fair, not when Aziraphale had stated his wishes, not when the stakes were so high for him. And the thing about tempting people into dissolution was that they rarely came into the aftermath with warm and fuzzy feelings about the tempter. It’d do no good to lure Aziraphale into something that would only make him resent Crowley, in the end. Better to keep things aboveboard. “I was having a _terrible_ hair day. Shot my attention completely to hell. Never had a chance.”

Aziraphale nodded. “I see,” he said, voice shaking just enough that Crowley could tell that he, too, had realized the cliff edge they were teetering on. He glanced at Crowley, then away again. “You asked me—the other day—how I’d come into the funds for this shop.”

“I did,” Crowley said, confused for a moment and then realizing—Aziraphale might have drawn a firm boundary around their interactions, but he could grant Crowley a different sort of intimacy, reveal an alternate piece of himself.

“My family,” Aziraphale said, walking out, slowly, from behind the till, “is an old one. I’ve always thought that was a bit of a silly thing to say, don’t you? As though some families can be older than other families, as though we don’t all go back to the same beginning. So I suppose you might say that my family _name_ is an old one. That you can trace us back to feudal landholders. Though what there is to be proud of in that—at any rate. I was taught, as a child, to be proud of my heritage, that members of the Fell family had been in the great courts of past monarchs, that we’d been inscribed on the historical record as bishops and squires. But we were not wealthy; I suppose we must have been, once, and I don’t mean to claim I grew up impoverished, or any such thing, but there is no family fortune, no land, anymore, no manor, none of it. Ordinary people, clinging to an old story.” He brought his hands together. “I was—I _am—_ the heir of the main branch, but when my parents died, I inherited no money and only one thing of value: a sword, given to one of my ancestors for service to the Crown. It had been in the family for years, as a sort of symbol of our stature. And I received it, and I brought it back to the awful little flat I was living in and stuck it in a corner, and I would go to my awful little job and sit at my desk wishing I had enough money to throw it all up and open a bookshop like I’d always wanted. And one day, I’d just—I’d had enough. I phoned an appraiser and I asked him how much the sword was worth, and he found me a buyer, and I—I sold it.”

“Whoa,” Crowley said.

“Indeed.” Aziraphale smiled tightly. “It wasn’t a fortune, but it was enough for this place, and I haven’t regretted it a moment since.”

“How did your family take it?”

“Oh, use your imagination,” Aziraphale said. “I do believe they’d have disowned me, if there’d been anything left that we actually owned. As it was, I haven’t spoken to most of them in years, which suits me rather well, I must say.” He took a deep breath. “So. You wondered how I got the money for the shop, well, there’s your answer, such as it is. Not certain it reflects particularly well on me, but—”

“I think it reflects damn _fantastically_ on you,” Crowley said, “don’t know if I know a single other person who’d be that brave.”

“Oh, I scarcely think it’s _brave—”_

“It absolutely is. You weren’t happy, and you found that you had the means to make yourself happy, and to hell with what anyone else thought, right? Can’t think of much braver than that, personally.”

“I suppose I’ve never thought of it that way before.”

“Thank you for telling me,” Crowley said. 

Aziraphale’s mouth twitched in a smile. “It felt good, as a matter of fact. To tell someone.”

“I’m—wait. You haven’t—”

“No, I’ve never told anyone else,” Aziraphale said, looking down at his hands. “I suppose I never wanted to, before.”

Crowley searched frantically for something to say, something that could possibly convey how touched he was without sounding unbearably saccharine. He came up empty.

“Don’t be too pleased with yourself, though,” Aziraphale said, his tone lighter. “I may never have _told_ Anathema, but frankly I’d be shocked if she didn’t know the whole story, one way or another.”

Crowley snorted. “Yeah, good call.”

“I’ll draw up a list, then,” Aziraphale said, straightening his back and walking briskly back towards the till. “Of everyone whom I may have...inconvenienced, somehow. Perhaps we can cross-check against the Barathrum database and see whether there are any connections.”

“Good idea. Yeah. I can do that.”

“Splendid.”

“You’re not going to lose this shop, angel,” Crowley said abruptly. “Not if I can help it.”

Aziraphale turned to look at him. “I do hope you’re right,” he said.


	8. Chapter 8

Anathema squinted at Crowley. “I’m going to say, almost orange? Burnt sienna. Like a Crayola.”

“You  _ cannot  _ expect me to know what that means,” Aziraphale said.

“I thought you said aura readings were, and I quote,  _ new-age rubbish?” _

“Well, they  _ are,  _ but that isn’t any reason they can’t be  _ comprehensible,  _ is it?”

“I’m being totally comprehensible!” Anathema insisted. “Crowley, you get what I’m saying, don’t you?”

Crowley made a face. “Honestly, I’m just wondering whether the aura clashes with my hair. I  _ cannot  _ pull off orange.”

“Oh, no, I’m certain it looks perfectly handsome,” Aziraphale said, and then looked very quickly at the ground.

_ “Hang  _ on,” Anathema said, “you can’t denigrate aura reading and then give opinions about the aesthetics—”

“I fail to see why not—”

Anathema turned demandingly to Crowley, who was still caught on  _ handsome  _ and the way Aziraphale’s eyes had darted at Crowley’s as he’d said it. “Can you  _ please  _ tell him his opinions aren’t valid—”

“Customer,” Aziraphale said abruptly, “I’m afraid you have to  _ do your actual job,”  _ and grabbed hold of Crowley to steer him away from the till and clear the path for the approaching woman.

“Ow,” Crowley said without heat, allowing himself to be dragged into a corner. “What, am I not presentable enough for your clientele?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Aziraphale said, letting go of his arm (unfortunately, in Crowley’s opinion). “You’re very—well, anyway, it’s simply that I wouldn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea about what you’re doing here. After all, you’re supposed to be convincing me to break the contract, not simply...socializing. It wouldn’t do for us to be flaunting our friendship in front of outsiders.”

“It’s not like the general public exactly knows or cares about what’s going on,” Crowley pointed out.

“Perhaps. But Gabriel has  _ spies.” _

“Surely that’s a bit melodramatic—”

“Oh, very well, he calls them Secret Shoppers, but they’re people that he pays to come in to the various shops in the Small Business Association and pretend to be ordinary customers so that they can take notes on how all customer service interactions go and report back on whether we’re violating policy. And given that he’s already taken notice of your presence, I shouldn’t like for him to end up putting two and two together.”

“Fair enough,” Crowley said. He glanced around at the bookshelves surrounding them. “Don’t think I’ve been in this section before, actually. What’re the goods around here?”

He’d asked it more out of idle politeness than actual curiosity, and was accordingly surprised when Aziraphale turned bright red and looked at the ground.

_ “What?”  _ he repeated. 

“Nothing in particular,” Aziraphale muttered unconvincingly.

Crowley peered at one of the shelves. “What’s this— _ Ravished by the Demon Prince?” _

“Ah—funny story about that one, actually—”

Crowley ignored him.  _ “Help! I Married a Vampire...Her Dragon Lover...Sex with the Swan God...” _

“That last one actually has some compelling intertextuality with the classical legend of Leda,” Aziraphale said.

“Ha!” Crowley grabbed  _ Temptation Awaits: A Night With My Dark Seducer  _ off of the shelf and brandished it accusingly at Aziraphale. “So you’ve  _ read  _ all these.”

“It would be terribly unprofessional of me not to be familiar with my own wares,” Aziraphale said stiffly.

“You’re not telling me you’ve read, what,  _ Pasta Dicks for Amateurs  _ or whatever—”

“It’s  _ The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Erotic Macaroni Portraiture,  _ and no, but that’s—different.”

“I am  _ begging  _ you to explain how.”

“I only purchased  _ those  _ books to bother Gabriel; these ones actually have a chance of  _ selling.” _

“They’re not exactly Antiquarian and Unusual, though, are they? Can’t imagine they’re the sort of thing your typical customer enjoys.”

“Oh, I’d assure you they’re  _ plenty  _ unusual,” Aziraphale said dryly, “and you’d be surprised at the diversity of interests found in your average rare book enthusiast.”

“I  _ am.” _

“Oh,” Anathema said, coming up behind him, “you found the stash.”

“Anathema, dear,” Aziraphale said, “please tell Crowley that these volumes are highly profitable for the shop—”

“Actually I’m pretty sure the margins are tiny,” Anathema said, and, in response to a pointed glare from Aziraphale, “but they  _ do  _ sell well.”

“Yes, well done, terribly savvy businessman, you,” Crowley said.

But Aziraphale, instead of smiling, or retorting, or even smugly accepting the compliment, glanced worriedly at Crowley. 

“What?”

“Don’t—”

“Don’t  _ what?”  _ Crowley noticed Anathema discreetly withdrawing back to the till. “What’d I say wrong, I’m sorry—”

Aziraphale shook his head. “Oh, no, it’s not you, I know you’re only being—funny, it’s simply that I do worry that I’m  _ not  _ a very good businessman. As much as Gabriel’s advice bothers me, he  _ is  _ right that my current setup is hardly sustainable. And yet here I am, stocking ridiculous craft books and naughty novels without a second thought for whether that’s actually the wisest choice. I ought to do, I don’t know, market research of some sort, or something. Actually take advantage of some of the features in that dreadful POS system and track sales patterns.”

“Do you  _ want  _ to do that?”

“Of course not. I can just about stomach selling the rare books to my more specialized clients. This whole business of pandering to the lowest common denominator with the highest common currency denomination is beyond me, I’m afraid.”

Crowley shrugged. “Then don’t do it. Look, I mean, I obviously don’t know every detail about the way your shop runs, I’m a very different sort of salesperson—actually, you know what, your whole quality-over-quantity thing, I know some guys who would  _ love  _ that—nevermind. Point is. I find it hard to believe that anyone who sat across my desk from me and proceeded to ruthlessly and efficiently gut my beautiful scammy contract isn’t worth his salt, business-wise.”

“That’s very kind of you to say—”

“It is  _ not  _ kind of me to say, I consider your mutilation of my efforts in linguistic deception an affront of the worst sort—”

“But,” Aziraphale continued, “that’s exactly what I mean. That I’m only financially viable because of things like that. Battling out that contract with you, selling the family heirloom for start-up funds, those aren’t precisely replicable strategies. I can’t just jump from one lifeboat to another and expect to stay afloat indefinitely.”

“Two things,” Crowley said. “First off, it was literally twenty-five years between the sword business and screwing me—”  _ bad word choice there —  _ “out of my rightfully earned commission. So I hardly think you can say that’s a pattern of any significance. Second, angel, that’s what...that’s what being successful  _ is.  _ Using whatever advantages you’ve got to the best of your ability. You think there’s anyone out there who didn’t get a lucky break or two? Family money—or, in your case, family melee weapons—good timing, a very dashing sales representative who didn’t realize he had a weakness for bowties until  _ way  _ too late—yeah, you’ve had some opportunities. You’ve also been clever enough to recognize ‘em, and  _ that’s  _ why you’re still around.”

“Oh, dear,” Aziraphale said, sighing, “I suppose you’re right. I just wish these things were more  _ dependable,  _ that’s all. Less risky.”

“This from the man who literally jumped in front of a moving car.”

“Yes, well, there’s no problem when one hasn’t the time to worry, is there?”

“So then, don’t worry,” Crowley said. “I know—I know, we’ve got no idea what’s going on with my job, and the contract, and I’m not saying you’re not right to be concerned, but—trust your instincts, a bit, that’s all. Your own ability to figure things out.”

“Mmm,” said Aziraphale. “It isn’t as though I’ve much other choice, at present.” He shook his head as though to clear it, and looked up at Crowley, his expression no longer serious. “Now,  _ what  _ was that you said about bowties, again?”

“You heard me,” Crowley said, feeling embarrassed for a split second before remembering that he’d thrown all (dubiously convincing) pretence of indifference out the window some time ago. “Know how I feel, don’t you, angel?”

Aziraphale smiled at him, his eyes darting across Crowley’s face. “I have an inkling.”

“Happy to elaborate, really, at your convenience,” Crowley said, aware that he was pushing it a bit but past caring, for the moment.

Aziraphale raised a hand to his neck, fingers playing with one of the loops of his tie. “Perhaps—” he began, but abruptly dropped his hand and shook his head. “That is. I think you had better go.” 

“Right,” said Crowley, chastened, “sorry—”

“No,” Aziraphale said, “it’s me, I’m—”

The door chimed, just then, and whatever Aziraphale had been about to say was lost to Anathema’s greeting the customer.

Which at least gave Crowley plenty to think about on the drive back to the office.

* * *

“So  _ then,”  _ Ligur said, “I told them about the  _ special  _ deal, the one that we only give to our  _ very best clients.” _

Hastur laughed. Or, rather, he emitted a noise that was clearly supposed to be a laugh, but was at best laugh-adjacent. “You mean the special deal that doesn’t exist?”

Ligur nodded.

“And what’d they say?”

“They said—” Ligur leaned in, even though there wasn’t anyone else within earshot of the meeting room— “that they’d  _ think about it.” _

“Oh, for—” Crowley threw his hands up. “All that and you didn’t even get the sale?”

“They said they’d think about it,” Ligur repeated. “Some of us don’t mind  _ waiting  _ a bit for a better payoff, Crowley.”

“If this is about the Fell contract—”

“It’s about having  _ pride in your work.  _ Not just slip-sliding through like it’s any old thing, easy as anything.”

“What does that even  _ mean?” _

“It means you’re sloppy,” Ligur said, “and sloppiness always comes back to bite you.”

“Oh, that is  _ rich,”  _ Crowley began, “you’re telling me that because I left the out-clause out  _ once  _ in however many hundred clients, your plodding style’s the way to go—”

“Speaking of the Fell contract,” Hastur interrupted, “any progress to report? You’ve certainly been spending enough time over there.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to be  _ sloppy,”  _ Crowley muttered. “But. Uh. Nothing yet. But I am very definitely working on it, absolutely, that’s—why I’m over there all the time.”

“What are you trying to do,” Ligur asked,  _ “annoy  _ Fell into cancelling the contract?”

“If nothing else works,” Crowley said sarcastically.

The truth was, he hadn’t made any progress—not on cancelling the contract, obviously, since that had never been his actual goal, but on trying to figure out what exactly was behind the request. Aziraphale had provided a list of everyone he thought might possibly have a grudge against him, and Crowley had dug through staff records and Googled for links between any of them and Barathrum. He’d come up blank. And while Aziraphale wasn’t hounding him for updates on his progress the way Hastur was, Crowley still worried that he’d grow tired of waiting for Crowley to unravel the problem and ask him to stop coming round. 

But he just wasn’t sure what else to do. After all, it wasn’t as though there even  _ was  _ necessarily a good reason that the Barathrum bosses wanted to get rid of Aziraphale’s shop. Maybe one of them had stopped in and been treated rudely by the staff; maybe they just had a grudge against old booksellers because their ex-husband had been an antique bookseller and wanted to punish them all the same. And even if they  _ did  _ unearth some obscure reason, Crowley was by no means certain that he’d actually be able to do anything about it. He’d hoped that there’d be some sort of easily provable misconduct, something that he and Aziraphale could dangle over the heads of whoever was out to get him, but as time went on, that appeared increasingly unlikely.

“Remind me again,” he said, as casually as possible, “why we’re trying to get out of that one?”

Hastur shrugged. “Don’t give me their full reasoning on every little decision, do they? I’ve no more idea than you do.”

“Why d’you want to know, anyway?” Ligur asked, rather more suspiciously than Crowley found comfortable.

“Oh, it’s not important,” he said. “Only that I thought maybe knowing what the issue is could help me try to find some leverage with Fell. If it’s something that he’s done to someone, would be good to know, even if it’s only so I can avoid putting a foot in it.”

Hastur grunted. “Well, it’s like I said, I don’t know. But I suppose, if you really think it’d be helpful to know—”

“It would,” Crowley said eagerly.

“Then I can go back to the bosses and ask what this is all about.”

“Gosh,” Crowley said, “thank you  _ so  _ much, Hastur, I  _ really  _ appreciate it. Do you know, I’ve always thought of you as something of a mentor figure—”

“Can it,” Hastur said. “Before I change my mind.”

“Yep. Right. Got it,” said Crowley, and fled, realizing only once he’d returned to his desk that the meeting had never actually officially ended.

So it was with, if not actual good news, then at least the possible glimmer of good news on the horizon, that he entered A.Z. Fell & Co. that afternoon as planned. Aziraphale’s schedule being what it was—ie, an abstruse document comprehensible by neither man nor beast—Crowley had taken to making a tentative appointment for their next meeting at the conclusion of the previous one, so that Aziraphale would know when to expect him and they could avoid a repetition of the Dildo Book Incident. Of late, Crowley had noticed that Anathema never seemed to be there whenever he showed up, and had been entertaining the idea that perhaps Aziraphale had been sending her on break directly before he showed up, thereby engineering a situation where he and Crowley would be alone together in the bookshop. Well, alone with each other and whatever random customer happened to wander in, at least.

Anathema was behind the till today, though, and Aziraphale nowhere in sight, and as he walked in Crowley was hit by a hammer of dread. Something was  _ wrong. _

“What is it?” he asked, not bothering to greet Anathema. “Where is he?”

If something had  _ happened  _ to Aziraphale, if he were hurt somehow—

“It’s—he can tell you,” she said. “He’s in the back.”

Crowley crossed the shop in a few long strides, to where Aziraphale was seated at his desk, hands folded in front of him, staring straight ahead at nothing.

“Hey,” Crowley said, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. “Angel. What’s up?”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, turning to look at him and smiling weakly. “Do forgive me. I forgot you’d arranged to come today. I—I’m afraid I’m not feeling quite up to talking, at the moment.”

“Yeah, thanks, that was pretty clear from the whole...everything _ ,”  _ Crowley said, “do you want to tell me what happened, or—?”

Aziraphale blinked. “Oh.”

“You don’t have to,” Crowley added, quickly. “Tell me, I mean. It’s not like we—like you—if it’s something private, I’m sorry, I can go. Leave you alone. I just—if you want to tell me. I’d like to hear. See if there’s anything I can do.”

“No,” Aziraphale said, sighing, “no, it’s not private, and I suppose it does...concern you, in a way. Please—” he gestured to the sofa.

Crowley sat, drumming his fingers on his thigh. “Well?”

“It’s the Small Business Association,” Aziraphale said. “Gabriel came by with the new documentation for this year. He’s—they’ve—the monthly fee, that I pay. That we all pay. It’s gone up rather precipitously. I’ve just been doing the calculations, and I don’t think that I shall be able to afford it. I’d be running the shop at a loss.”

“So don’t—I mean, do you have to pay it? Can’t you just...not? What’re they going to do, kick you out of the stupid Small Business Association? Not like you’re exactly getting anything out of being in it in the first place.”

“Oh, no,” Aziraphale said. “That is, for one, I’ve signed paperwork, it wouldn’t be  _ right—”  _ Crowley snorted derisively at this— “but beyond that, it was part of the purchase agreement for the shop. They could take me to court, probably seize the property.”

“Well, okay, then,” Crowley said, “I mean,  _ how  _ much can they actually have raised the fee? Isn’t there some kind of regulation? Limits on what they’re allowed to do?”

“Unfortunately,” Aziraphale said, “whoever drew up the initial bylaws doesn’t seem to have been quite so thorough at crafting documentation as you are. I’ve been over them a hundred times—if there were a way out of the Association, I’d have found it, I assure you—I practically have them memorized. And there’s nothing in there about limits on fee increases. They simply have to prove that they’re using all fees collected for legitimate business operations, not embezzling them, or what have you. And I’m certain Gabriel will have found  _ plenty  _ of use for the money.”

“Do you think it  _ is  _ about the money?” Crowley asked. “Or is it that he knows you can’t afford it—maybe that several of you can’t afford it—and he’s hoping to chase you out?”

“I did have that notion,” Aziraphale admitted. “But I suppose it scarcely matters, does it? The result is the same, either way. I can’t make it work. Not with my current income and expenditures.”

“So—what, then?” Crowley asked. “Let Anathema go?”

Aziraphale sighed heavily. “That would cover the sum, certainly, for now, but...it feels like merely prolonging the inevitable. A slow suffocation.”

“So you’re just giving up?”

“What on earth else am I to do?” Aziraphale snapped. “Yes, all right, I could let Anathema go, I could attempt to cut expenditures closer than they’ve been cut before, and limp along for what, another year? Until the fees go up again, and then I’m in the same position with even fewer options for where to go. Or, I suppose, I could do what Gabriel probably  _ hopes  _ I’ll do, and entirely redo my business model. Sell dreadful paperback thrillers and postcards for tourists and terrible little knickknacks, and give up every ounce of actual  _ joy  _ I get from this place. But I...perhaps it makes me weak, perhaps it makes me stubborn, but I can’t do that. I won’t.”

“I’ll pay it,” Crowley said, suddenly, before the thought had time to reach the part of his brain that governed rational decision-making. “The fee. I can do it.”

Aziraphale gaped at him.

“Really,” Crowley said, feeling stupider by the second, “not joking. It’d solve things, wouldn’t it?”

Aziraphale shut his mouth, squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, and shook his head. “That’s...Crowley, you don’t even know how much it is.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Crowley said. “I mean—within reason, obviously, but if cutting staff is enough to get you there then I imagine I can swing it. I—wow, there is literally no way to say this that doesn’t make me sound insufferable—I have a lot of money, okay? I’m very good at my job, and I work on commission, and...yeah.” He stared at the ground.

There was a pause, during which Crowley wondered frantically whether Barathrum would let him work remotely if he was forced by embarrassment to drop everything and flee to Tahiti.

“That’s very kind of you,” Aziraphale said, at last, “it’s—outstandingly generous, really, I hardly know what to say—”

“Hrorghk,” said Crowley, intelligently.

“But I’m afraid I can’t let you do that.”

“You can, definitely, it’s really easy, just—”

“No,” Aziraphale said. “Absolutely not.”

“Look, if this is about—I don’t know, your  _ pride,  _ or something, about wanting to make it on your own, I get it, but you’ve got to put that aside. You said you’re worried you’re not a good businessman, well, prove yourself wrong, take the bailout. Nothing more businesslike than  _ that.” _

“It’s not about pride,” Aziraphale said. “Or—not about  _ that  _ kind of pride, at any rate. No, I’ve no problem doing what I need to for the shop’s sake, but I can’t—I can’t do that to  _ you.  _ I can’t take advantage of you like that—”

“I am literally  _ begging  _ you to take advantage of me, not even in the fun way, although, in case you were wondering,  _ definitely  _ still up for the fun way—”

“Well, I won’t do it. I mean, Crowley,  _ think  _ about it for a moment. This—” he gestured between them— “whatever it is, whatever it could be, it’s not...it would be unfair to both of us, I’d always...feel as though I owed you something. And you don’t want that. You must see it.”

“But you don’t  _ have  _ to feel like you owe me anything. It wouldn’t be a loan, or whatever, it wouldn’t be—it’s not like I’m trying to  _ buy  _ you. You can take the cheque and tell me to go to Hell, honestly, I mean, not going to pretend I’d be happy about it, but I’d do it. No strings attached. Look, Aziraphale, I mean, yes, I like you, a lot,  _ so  _ much, think I may have made that rather clear by now, but that’s not why I’m offering. I want to help because I like your  _ shop,  _ and I don’t want Anathema to lose her job even if she  _ does  _ keep trying to sell me the world’s most cursed kinky how-to guides, and I think Gabriel seems like a massive knob and I’d quite enjoy sticking it to him. And—look, if you’re not comfortable taking something for nothing, then sell me shares of the business. Make me a partner.”

“I’m sorry. I do—I do believe you, of course, that you don’t expect anything, but I can’t do it. Perhaps you’re able to compartmentalize to that extent, but I don’t believe I could be.”

“You could try.”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, voice catching, “please stop asking. If you have any regard for me at all, you must stop asking, or—I shan’t be able to keep saying no.”

Crowley sagged back into the sofa. “Fine. But—if you change your mind—”

“My,” Aziraphale said, with affected lightness, “the list of things I’ve available to me if I should change my mind  _ does  _ keep growing, doesn’t it?”

Crowley forced out a laugh. “So. What are you going to do, then?”

“The first payment isn’t due for another month,” Aziraphale said. “So there’s a bit of time for me to think it over and decide whether it’s worth attempting to stick it out here. But if not, well...perhaps I’ll sell to that conglomerate that keeps bothering me about wanting the space. They sent over another offer last week, it’s very generous, so if I were to sell...I could find a smaller storefront, or one in a less desirable neighborhood. It wouldn’t mean giving up entirely.”

“Hang on,” Crowley said, something nagging in the corner of his brain, “this...conglomerate, who are they? What’s it called?”

Aziraphale looked surprised. “Ah—one moment, I’ve got their letter here somewhere…” He rifled through the stack of papers in front of him. “Here.”

He handed the letter to Crowley, who scanned over the boilerplate language and offered sale price to get to the signature at the bottom. “Therion, Inc.”

“Yes, that’s it,” Aziraphale said, “I’m afraid I’m not familiar, does it signify anything to you?”

Crowley fumbled for his phone, fingers dragging across the screen as he pulled up the page he was looking for. “Yeah.  _ Therion, Inc. is a subdivision of the Leviathan Corporation,”  _ he read aloud.

“So?”

“So the Leviathan Corporation owns Barathrum Systems,” Crowley said, slowly. “Which means...it’s my employer that’s been trying to buy your shop.”


	9. Chapter 9

_ “Your  _ company?” Aziraphale repeated. “Trying to buy my shop?”

“Yeah,” Crowley said. It was less that the penny had dropped and more that an entire wallet of coins had tumbled onto the floor. “And, think about it. That’s got to be why I was suddenly asked to terminate your contract, hasn’t it? Obviously they didn’t want to be trying to purchase a business they already had an active relationship with.”

“But…” Aziraphale shook his head. “It can’t be that. Oh, I believe you that they’re part of the same company, but Therion has been after me to purchase the shop since long before I came to you for a new computer system. Why would your employer have even let you sign me as a client to begin with?”

“I mean, it’s an enormous corporation,” Crowley said. “I barely knew Therion was even affiliated with us in the first place, you think I’d double-check whether every insignificant client—I mean, not that you’re insignificant, I just, from a financial perspective—anyway, it’s not like I had to run you by anyone for approval.”

“Hmm,” Aziraphale said. “Well, you’re most likely correct, then, but I don’t see how that helps us—me—much. I still can’t afford to pay the increased fees for the Small Business Association, and even if I  _ don’t  _ sell to Therion, I may well have to sell to  _ someone  _ to keep the business afloat.”

“No—no, look. It’s all connected. It’s got to be. You can’t really believe it’s a coincidence that Gabriel should yank up the fees practically at the same time as I’ve been told to terminate your contract and that Therion has sweetened its offer. They’re working together somehow.”

“Surely not,” Aziraphale said, but Crowley could tell—because it was the one thing he’d had to get very good at noticing—that he was on the verge of being convinced. “I may not  _ like  _ Gabriel very much, or, really, at all, but he’s the president of the  _ Small  _ Business Association. All of our meetings are very much focused on how to fight  _ against  _ the large corporations like Leviathan and all its subsidiaries. No offence to you, of course, dear,” he added. “I can believe that Gabriel wants me out of the neighborhood—I’ve known that for some time—but I can’t believe he’d actually be working to sell me out to Therion. I imagine he wants to replace me with some trendy little boutique or touristy tchotchke shop, something more in line with his vision of the Streamlined Customer Experience, not whatever soulless abomination  _ your  _ lot wants to put in.”

“Listen to yourself. Streamlined Customer Experience, that sound like anything small-business-y to you? Gabriel’s corporate. It’s not only your shop he doesn’t get on with. I mean, that cluttered place with the licence-plate magnets and the ethnically dubious dolls? That’s one of yours, isn’t it? I can’t imagine Gabriel approving of whatever’s going on there, either. He’s not trying to  _ change  _ the Small Business Association, angel. He’s trying to destroy it.”

Aziraphale blinked. “I suppose—I’m acquainted with several of the other proprietors, and I know they’re not particularly fond of Gabriel, either, but, well, who  _ would  _ be? I never wondered whether he might not dislike  _ them  _ just as much.”

“And,” Crowley added, “I haven’t read those bylaws you know so much about, but I’d bet an entire stack of erotic romances that they don’t allow for the fees to go up for one business without increasing them for the others. Do you think you’re the only one who can’t afford them?”

“You’re quite right, it’s got to be the same for everyone. I’d just assumed that I was the only one unsuccessful enough to actually find the increase a burden.”

“You’re not unsuccessful,” Crowley said, “told you before you’re not, I  _ refuse  _ to believe that anyone who got the better of me in a contract dispute is a failure, and not just because of the massive blow my ego would take. And didn’t you say, anyway, that you used to have a better business model? Before the Core Hours and the mandated mass-market paperbacks and all of that?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there you go, then, it’s not  _ you  _ that’s the reason your shop’s been suffering. It’s the rules that, again,  _ Gabriel  _ forced on you. And I bet it’s the same for the others.”

“And?” Aziraphale asked. “What if it is? It doesn’t change the bylaws, and it doesn’t change the fee increase, and it doesn’t change the fact that I haven’t enough money to pay it.”

“Because, look, if you accept that Gabriel’s corporate, if you accept that he’s trying to bring all of you down, then you’ve got to accept that he’s working with Therion, or Leviathan, or whoever, to manage that. And I  _ highly  _ doubt  _ that’s  _ permissible under your blessed bylaws.”

“It certainly isn’t,” Aziraphale said. “Are you suggesting that I...depose him, somehow?”

“I wouldn’t have put it that way, but, yeah. Basically.”

Aziraphale nodded, and although his face was still lined with worry, his eyes were alight with interest. “I’ll—we’ll—need proof, of course. We can’t precisely go starting a revolution among the members of the Small Business Association without anything more than a theory.”

Crowley tried and failed not to grin at the  _ we.  _ “Yeah. Definitely. Uh—”

But Aziraphale wasn’t listening any longer. “There must be some sort of paper trail,” he said, more to himself than to Crowley. “Or—I expect it’s an electronic one, yes? Let’s see. You said you didn’t have to run me by any of the higher-ups for approval, did you? So someone must have had to tip them off that there was a conflict of interest between your contract and Therion’s offer to buy my shop. There has to be some sort of connection within Barathrum itself.”

“No. Not necessarily. I didn’t have to get you approved before you became a client, yeah, but I  _ did  _ have to put you into our CRM database once you signed. And that’s centralized to Leviathan, so it’s not even necessarily that anyone at Barathrum would’ve had to know. Could be someone I’ve never heard of that’s working with Gabriel on this.”

“So you have access to the database?”

“Ah...sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“I have limited permissions,” Crowley admitted. “That’s why I didn’t bother checking it earlier, I practically forget the thing exists, with how little I use it. But I should be able to see if there’s a note on your profile, or something. Shouldn’t raise any flags if someone checks, not as though there’s anything suspicious in looking at my own client’s record.”

“Very well,” Aziraphale said. “You can start there, I suppose—that is, I should say, provided you’re willing to help. I’m afraid I assumed, rather unfairly—”

“Angel. Did you miss the bit where I offered to literally pay your entire fee for you? Of course I’m willing to help. I’m glad I  _ can.” _

“Yes. All right,” Aziraphale said, smiling—weakly, but smiling, for the first time since he’d told Crowley about the fee increase. “You’ll try to see if there’s anything in the database, and then…”

“And then we’ll go from there. It’s not like we need cast-iron proof of some evil plot to stop this, right? If we can get together sufficiently credible evidence to convince your fellow small business owners that Gabriel hasn’t got their best interests at heart,  _ surely  _ there’s a way for you all to vote him out. Or even confront him with whatever we find and force him to step down. You’re not going to actually have to prove anything beyond doubt in a court of law.”

“Yes,” said Aziraphale, again. “Yes.”

Which was unquestionably better than the “no, no, no” from before, anyway.

“Right, then,” Crowley said. “I’ll head back to work and check your profile in the CRM, see if there’s anything there. Let you know as soon as I find anything.”

“And I’ll just...wait here, then?”

“Sorry,” Crowley said. “But I can’t exactly have you coming in to Barathrum right now, last thing we need’s Hastur spotting you and taking it on himself to try and get you to cry off from the contract. Bad enough interacting with him regularly, but if he were actually  _ trying  _ to be unpleasant…”

“Indeed,” said Aziraphale. “I only...what, am I supposed to simply sit here uselessly while you go off and solve everything?”

“I’m not  _ solving everything,  _ I’m looking you up in a database. Next bit’s got to be all you, hasn’t it?  _ I  _ can’t very well expose Gabriel.”

“No, you’re quite right,” Aziraphale said.

“Look, sooner I leave, sooner I can check the system and see what’s going on. I don’t want to run off, but…”

“Of course. Please. I expect you ought to be back at work, anyway, I’ve kept you such a dreadfully long time…”

“You are massively overestimating my work ethic, there.”

“Mmm.” Aziraphale waved a hand. “Well, erm, I look forward to hearing from you later, then…”

Crowley stood up. Aziraphale hesitated a moment, then stood as well, more heavily than usual. He looked better than he had when Crowley had first come in, but his face was still writ with worry. Crowley wanted, in a wholly non-sexual way (okay, a  _ mostly  _ non-sexual way), to reach out and smooth the lines of his forehead, to wrap his arms around him, to kiss the spot above his eyebrow where his hairline receded.

He reached out an awkward hand. “Talk to you later.”

Aziraphale took it. “Good luck,” he said, in tones perhaps more suited to seeing someone off to war than back to work.

Crowley attempted not to read too much into this on the drive back.

* * *

It had been some time since Crowley had accessed the Barathrum CRM. While all his clients had to be entered in the system, that delightful task usually fell to the administrative staff, not the salespeople. Crowley was  _ also  _ supposed to track every meeting he had with a client and log it in the database, but he practically never remembered—and, certainly, in Aziraphale’s case, attempting to describe every interaction would be...over-informative. “Representative got very drunk with client and engaged in sloppy lift-kissing, highlights of which included client’s tongue in representative’s ear and representative’s fingers just under the waistband of client’s trousers. Result: Deal not closed.”

After being forced to reset the password he’d long since forgotten, enable two-factor authentication by downloading an app onto his phone, and complete a 30-minute interactive GDPR training, Crowley at last managed to log into the database and search for Aziraphale’s record. 

A box popped up onscreen.

“ALERT: Do not pursue retention activities with this client.”

“Okay,” Crowley muttered, “but tell me  _ why.” _

He clicked on the alert message, but there didn’t appear to be anything more to it. He noted the date—a few days before Hastur had told him to sever the contract—and the employee who’d added the alert, identifiable only by an entity ID number. 

Acting on impulse—it was probably nothing, it was no doubt some admin assistant at Leviathan head office who’d been told to put the alert on—Crowley grabbed a sheet of paper and jotted down the ID number. He stuck his phone in his pocket and snuck out of the office. Best not to do what he had in mind on company property.

Once he’d got far enough away, he pulled out his phone and tapped NEWT PULSIFER-MOBILE.

“Hello?”

“Newt,” Crowley said, pitching his voice low, “can you get away for a minute? I need to talk to you where you won’t be overheard by the other techs.”

“Oh,” Newt said, sounding surprised. “This  _ is  _ away from the other techs.”

“What do you mean? You’re on lunch?”

“No. I work from home now. Permanently. Well, except when I go on installations, obviously—”

“You got them to let  _ you  _ work from home?”

“It wasn’t exactly my choice,” Newt admitted, “so much as it was...for the good of the other techs. Apparently when I’m in the office we have a five hundred percent increase in computer malfunctions. Which I don’t think is fair at  _ all,  _ because—”

“Okay, yeah, fine,” Crowley said. “You work from home. That’s great, that’s perfect, actually. I have an entity ID number for an employee that I got from the CRM, and I need you to tell me who it belongs to.”

“Sure,” Newt said. “I can look it up for you right now.”

“Great. Outstanding.” Crowley read him the number, and waited for an agonizing minute while Newt typed it in and waited for the search results to load.

“Looks like that ID belongs to Dagon Karkarias,” Newt said. “Someone you know?”

“Urk. No,” Crowley said, throwing his head back in frustration. “Uh. Can you find their job title?”

Newt hummed a slightly off-key and extremely irritating rendition of “The Pina Colada Song” while he searched. “Senior Executive Assistant to Beelzebub Prince,” he said. 

“And who’s Beelzebub Prince, when they’re at home?”

“VP of Acquisitions at Therion, Inc.”

“Aha. Okay. Great,” Crowley said. “So we’ve got somewhere to start.”

“Start?”

“Newt, my friend—”

“Are we friends? I feel like I remember you telling me a few months ago that we were ‘absolutely not friends’ —”

“My friend,” Crowley repeated. “Mind if I invite myself over for a bit of lunch?”

“It’s four in the afternoon.”

“A bit of dinner?”

“I don’t know,” Newt began, “I was just planning on heating up some soup…”

“I’ll bring the food. Okay?”

“Um..okay.”

“I just need your help with this  _ really  _ minor thing, shouldn’t even take that long, it’ll just be easier to go over it in person.”

“I guess.”

“Great. Awesome. Fantastic. I’ll see you in a bit, then. Just text me the address. And I promise to bring takeaway for all three of us.”

_ “Three?”  _ Newt asked.

“I’m bringing...a friend,” Crowley said. “As long as he’s free.”

* * *

Aziraphale, unsurprisingly,  _ was  _ free, and in less than an hour’s time they were in the car, a bag of Thai food in the backseat, heading to Newt’s house in practically-the-suburbs.

“I don’t see how this gets us any further along,” Aziraphale said. “Don’t mistake me—I’m very glad you were able to determine who added the note to my record, but learning that it’s some higher-up at Therion only confirms what we already suspected.”

“Right,” said Crowley. “Which is why we need Newt’s help for part two of the plan.”

“The Plan,” Aziraphale echoed. “Sounds very...cloak-and-dagger.”

“Hey, if I’m going to break pretty much every rule in my employee handbook, I’m at least going to sound cool while I do it.”

“Oh dear. Are you—that is, I shouldn’t want you to risk your  _ job  _ for this.”

“Only risking my job if we get caught, angel,” Crowley said, more breezily than he felt. “Anyway, not like  _ they’re  _ exactly sticking to the letter of the law, are they?”

“No, but we needn’t sink to their level in order to oppose them.”

“Do you  _ really  _ think that?”

Aziraphale sighed. “No. Not really.”

“Good,” Crowley said, pulling into Newt’s drive. “Then let’s save your shop.”

Newt’s house was small, but better-kept than Crowley might have thought, if he’d spent any time whatsoever thinking about Newt’s living arrangements. As they came in, he glanced into the room to the left and saw a puzzle, one of the intense 1000-piece ones, laid out on a table, along with a stack of, somewhat incongruously, print copies of computer-themed magazines.

After brief re-introductions (“oh yes, the nice young man who set up my computer system,  _ so  _ delightful to see you again,  _ what  _ a lovely home”) and the careful meting out of the Thai food, Crowley was more than ready to embark upon what he was calling, definitely only in his head and not out loud, Operation Bookshop Rescue. 

“So,” Newt said, once they’d all clustered uncomfortably around his computer (or, well, around his monitor and keyboard. Apparently he kept the CPU in another room “where it was safer”). “What are we doing, exactly?”

“Those names you gave me,” Crowley said. “Dagon and Beelzebub, at Therion. I’m—we’re—fairly certain that they’re up to something unsavoury.”

“Like what?”

“Not sure what it’ll actually  _ look  _ like,” Crowley admitted, “but I need to find any connection between them and a man named Gabriel Kerux. Emails, phone records, anything suspicious. All that’s got to be stored somewhere digitally, hasn’t it?”

“Do you really think they’ll have been stupid enough to do...whatever it is...on their work accounts?” Aziraphale asked. 

“If they weren’t expecting to meet any resistance  _ within  _ Leviathan? Yeah, I think they might’ve. Especially since, from their perspective, they’re not breaking any promises—well, your contract notwithstanding. It could well just seem like business as usual for them. And,” he added, “the work accounts are where we have an in, so we might as well start there.”

“Okay,” Newt said, “just give me a moment to search—”

“Hold on,” Aziraphale cut in. “Won’t it raise some sort of flag that you’re accessing these email accounts?”

Newt shook his head. “No, that’s a good question, but if you give me the email address they were sent to, I can search whether we’ve ever had that email added to an address book without accessing the actual accounts. The search would still show up on an audit, but I run so many similar searches to check things before I head out to a client installation that it’s unlikely anyone would notice one in particular.”

“I suppose that’s all right, then,” Aziraphale said, and gave him Gabriel’s email address.

“It’ll take a moment for me to go through it,” Newt said, typing it into the search bar, “and, um, I do better without people standing over my shoulder, so…”

“Of course,” Aziraphale said quickly, and withdrew to a corner of the sitting room. 

“I’ve got a question,” Crowley told him, following closely behind. 

“Mmm?” 

“Well. Less of a question and more of an observation—”

“Oh dear,” Aziraphale said dryly, “it’s the worst person at the audience interaction portion of every talk I’ve ever been to.”

“Ha. Yeah. Well. See, the thing is, I had the distinct impression, from the way you talked about getting a new computer system, that you weren’t exactly...up-to-date with technology.”

“Certainly I will allow that the setup at my shop was in need of some modernization, and that I may perhaps have dragged my feet on implementing it.”

“Right,” Crowley said. “And, you may remember, when your system broke down you couldn’t figure out what the issue was and had to call me for help.”

“That was indeed memorable,” Aziraphale said, half-under his breath.

“But, you also...you warned me about my Smart Lock like you knew what you were talking about, and just now, whatever your question was, about Leviathan tracking Newt’s searches…”

“You were correct,” Aziraphale said, “that really isn’t a question.”

“All right, then, my question is, are you really as bad with technology as you make yourself out to be, or is this whole—” he waved a hand at Aziraphale’s distinctly old-fashioned attire—  _ “thing  _ a put-on?”

Aziraphale sighed. “I don’t believe I’ve ever said that I was  _ bad  _ with computers. I’ve said, and I still say, because it’s entirely true, that I don’t much like them and I certainly don’t trust them. And, yes, as a result of not liking them, I am somewhat unfamiliar with certain features. But, really, Crowley, I’m not  _ that  _ old, e-mail isn’t exactly after my time, of course I know how it works. And—” he looked down at the carpet— “do you remember, when I told you how I came to start my shop, I mentioned I was working a dreadful little office job before that?”

“Course I remember.”

“Well, it was a different time, certainly, things weren’t so advanced as they are now, but a certain portion of that job required me to do some very small-scale surveillance work.  _ Don’t  _ get excited,” he said, quickly, “it was more along the lines of checking up on insurance claims than whatever ridiculous espionage you’re no doubt imagining. But I’ve always been wary, ever since then, of exactly what sort of information I’m allowing my computer, or my phone, or, yes, my door locks, access to, and exactly whom they might be sharing it with. So while I haven’t kept up to date with a great many things, I  _ do  _ attempt to stay abreast of security concerns specifically.”

“Huh,” Crowley said, feeling rather stupid. “That makes...perfect sense.”

“Of course it does,” Aziraphale said, “and I’m sorry there’s no dramatic backstory, or exciting deception, only my usual over-caution.”

“Hang on, though, that  _ doesn’t  _ explain why you were so completely unable to figure out what was wrong with your POS system—”

“Oh dear,” Aziraphale said pointedly, “I do  _ wonder  _ what  _ possible  _ reason I might have had for not putting overmuch effort into the problem.”

“Wha—”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” he added, quickly. “It’s not as though I broke it on  _ purpose.  _ But I did...make the most of the opportunity.”

Crowley grinned. “Have to say, it’s been a while since anyone pulled the whole  _ oh could you help me, I’m afraid I don’t quite understand the homework  _ bit with me—”

“I was not  _ pulling  _ anything, the system  _ was  _ very legitimately broken, and if you’re telling me that it was proper procedure for you to come over yourself and make hushed phone calls while half-naked in my toilet—”

“I was  _ at most  _ a quarter naked,  _ please,  _ I’ve gone out on the street in far less than that—”

“Do let me know next time you do, then, will you, I think I’d rather enjoy seeing that—”

“I will literally take you up on that right now, if you really mean it, sounds like an absolutely brilliant idea to me—”

“Hey,” Newt said tentatively, “I think I might’ve found something.”

Crowley, who’d mostly forgotten he was there, whipped his head around. “Yeah?”

“Come see.” 

They clustered around Newt’s monitor again.

“There have been multiple outgoing emails from the Therion servers to the address you gave me,” Newt said. “The dates are here.”

Aziraphale leaned in towards the screen. “Yes, look—one of them was sent yesterday. It must have been telling Gabriel to go ahead with the fee increase on the Small Business Association members.”

“So we’ve got proof they’re in contact,” Crowley said. “But...not exactly a smoking gun, is it?”

“I can’t access the actual email content without the chance it’ll be flagged,” Newt said. 

Crowley glanced at Aziraphale. “Think the evidence of  _ some  _ deal going down is enough to rally your fellow small businesses?”

“It isn’t quite that,” Aziraphale said. “We can see the pattern, yes, but I suppose  _ technically  _ there’s nothing to prove they weren’t emailing about something entirely unrelated.”

“Which is also what Gabriel will say if you try to confront him with it,” Crowley agreed. “So we need something else. Newt, do you have any kind of access to financial records?”

“I can have,” Newt said warily. “Depending. What exactly do you want?”

“Large, suspicious transactions on either Beelzebub’s or Dagon’s account.”

Newt frowned. “Yeah, okay,” he said after a moment, and clicked into a folder on his desktop. “Monthly budget reconciliations aren’t exactly secret,” he explained. “So if we go to the acquisitions department…” He pulled up a spreadsheet. “Here’s last month.”

Crowley peered at it. “That last line. It’s in the actual expenditures but not in the budget, right?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said,  _ “and  _ it’s the only transaction associated with that particular accounting code.”

“Can you find out what the accounting code is for?” Crowley asked.

Newt nodded. “Oh yeah. One sec.” He opened another spreadsheet. “Uh… ‘discretionary spending,’ apparently.”

“That’s got to be it,” Crowley said. “Can we find out where it went?”

“I can look in the purchase-to-pay system.”

“That won’t get you in trouble?” Aziraphale asked.

“It shouldn’t,” Newt said. “Lots of reasons I could be going in there. Client invoices for my installations, for one.” He opened a new browser tab and typed in the accounting code they’d found. “All right, one payment in the last month, check issued to…”

“Gabriel Kerux,” Crowley finished. “Bingo.”

“Bingo indeed,” Aziraphale said. “Newt, dear boy, would you be so kind as to print it out?”

“Sure,” Newt said.

“What do you want to do with it, then?” Crowley asked, while Newt fetched the printout. “Go directly to Gabriel, or try to get the others on your side first?”

“I’ve been considering that,” Aziraphale said. “I think it’s probably best to confront Gabriel first. The whole thing’s rather convoluted, and I don’t particularly fancy the idea of explaining it twenty times over.”

“Yeah, fair,” Crowley said. “And if Gabriel  _ doesn’t  _ back down once you’ve shown him that you know what he’s up to and can expose him,  _ then  _ you can try to foment a rebellion.”

“Precisely.”

Newt returned with the printout. “Here,” he said, handing it to Aziraphale. “I hope it helps.”

“Thank you  _ ever  _ so much for assisting us,” Aziraphale said, taking his hand. “I’m afraid I can’t offer you much in the way of compensation, but, please be assured, you are  _ always  _ entitled to the friends-and-family discount at A.Z. Fell & Co.”

Newt looked predictably underwhelmed by this. Crowley mentally resolved to send him a whopping e-gift card to some first-rate puzzle shop once he got the chance.

“It’s getting late,” he said. “Don’t want to take up any more of your time. Come on, angel, I’ll give you a lift home.”

They didn’t talk much on the drive back into town. Aziraphale, Crowley noted from the corner of his eye, was staring fixedly at the printout Newt had given him, even though it was certainly too dark in the car for him to be able to read it. Understandable enough, really. Had it only been earlier today that he’d received the notice of the increased fees? 

“You all right?” he asked.

“What? Oh, yes,” Aziraphale said. “Forgive my woolgathering.”

“Nah. Nothing to forgive. You’ve got a lot to think about.”

“Indeed.”

They were quiet for a moment.

“I believe it’s just that...well, I’d never  _ liked  _ Gabriel, I’d never thought that the new Small Business Association standards were fair, or wise, but I did think that he was...on my side. After a fashion. Trying to help us all succeed, even if I didn’t much like the way he went about it. So to find out that really, there hasn’t been any difference between that and—forgive me—your lot, it’s a bit of a paradigm shift. You think one thing about the way the world is, you structure your life around it, and then to discover it’s not like that at all…”

“It’s not the whole world that’s not the way you thought, though,” Crowley said, as gently as he could, “it’s one person. One institution. That you never liked anyway. Not so much to reconsider, when you think about it, is it?”

“I suppose not.”

Aziraphale was silent for the rest of the ride. Crowley thought of saying something, once or twice, but stopped himself each time.

They pulled up in front of the bookshop. Crowley, out of whatever misplaced chivalric instinct, ran round to open the passenger door for Aziraphale.

“Thank you.”

“Sure,” Crowley said, closing the door behind him, “uh, have a good night, I’ll call you in the morning, if you want? Or, I mean, if you don’t need backup for Gabriel, just, let me know once you’ve sorted it out—again, if you want—”

“Crowley?”

“H’m?”

Aziraphale reached his hands up to Crowley’s face—they were just as soft as he remembered, Crowley thought distractedly—drew it gently towards his own, and kissed him. 

Kissed him without hesitation, or explanation—not that Crowley really needed an explanation, he thought, not when Aziraphale’s hand had made its way to the nape of his neck and was tugging gently on his hair, not when Crowley could pull him in closer, arm around his waist, and feel the soft weight of Aziraphale’s stomach pressing high on Crowley’s hips, sending ribbons of heat coursing through his body. 

Aziraphale made a low, halting noise and stepped back, running a thumb over Crowley’s cheekbone and down towards his mouth before dropping his hand and separating them entirely.

“Do you—” Aziraphale began, broke off, and shook his head. “That is, would you—” He stopped again.

“Cat got your tongue?” Crowley asked, and then, feeling inordinately proud of his own cleverness, “because if you need help finding it I—”

“Crowley!” Aziraphale said. “For heaven’s sake, I’m trying to ask you to come inside.”

Crowley’s mouth snapped shut. 

“Uh,” he said, after a moment, “I mean,  _ yes,  _ but, are you sure? We’re not out of this yet, not by a long shot, you’ve no idea what Gabriel could say to you tomorrow and until we figure out a way to stop Therion from bothering you I’m still technically your adversary—”

“I don’t care anymore. Not if you don’t.”

“Course I don’t, angel.”

“Good,” said Aziraphale, and stretched out his hand. Crowley took it. “Come on, then.”


End file.
